I got this camera as a gift awhile back now and it is still going strong after many a holiday and drunken night out. The Canon Digital Ixus 850 IS is a digital compact camera measuring a petite 8cm x 5cm x 2cm (approximately). Making this a great camera to be able to quickly pick up and stash away in the smallest of bags. That is just one of the unique selling points for this camera; its size is unusual for its performance. Not being a particularly technical minded person this camera suits me down to the ground; it has been produced with people like me in mind. The features are very easy to master and it is simple enough to just 'point and shoot'.

The camera is 7.1 megapixels and the quality of photos you can achieve with this is excellent. Though there are now a lot more decidedly higher powered and higher megapixel models available this is still pretty good going for a compact digital camera. The CCD sensor is able to detect very high quality details and from this you get very good images. Another of its great traits is the wide angle lens which is 28mm (equivalent) and a 3.8x zoom; this is good going for a camera of this sort and makes it very versatile particularly for landscape shots along with being more accurate. Canons IS technology enables photos to be taken without having to worry about shaky hands or a backwards self portrait shot as it has inbuilt image stabilising technology. This is a particularly good feature to have on a camera.

The camera has a good ISO range from 80 up to 1600, which will fill the memory up and kill the battery but it is good to have that range of options. There are also a lot of inbuilt photo settings such as colour changes and editing tools that you can utilise both before and after you have your shot, nothing like what you can do in Photoshop but it gives more flexibility. There are also different shooting modes to choose from including sun, snow and portrait to name a few depending on what kind of photo you are after. The camera uses face detection as a standard, which I tend to turn off as it often won't focus on the correct face or main feature that I am after. This is changed easily in the feature settings.

The look of the camera is sleek and elegant being matt and shiny silver colouring. The model has a large LCD image screen covering nearly 70% of the back of the camera which makes changing settings and viewing photos very simple. There is an easy to use switch on the top right of the camera where you can change from auto to manual options along with the filming option. The battery and SD both fit into a nifty compartment on the bottom of the camera, the cover fails here as it feels as if the piece could easily be snapped off, though I have yet to be proven right. The camera is very sturdy and durable, having been knocked about a fair bit there are very few marks on the casing and no faults as yet.

This is a great all round digital camera that can be picked up cheaply now, i would definately recommend this product for its quality, reliability and durability.