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I made the leap from a very capable Nikon Pronea APS SLR to digital compact about 12 months ago and after some research bought a Canon Ixus 330. this is a 2mega-pixel camera that for standard 6x4 and even 7x5 prints is great - no grain and definately of a quality that can be framed.

The camera is small but feature packed. Most photo's i take use the automatic setting which is adequate for happy sdnapping of the kids etc which is mainly what i tend to do. There is a manual setting which I have been experimenting with and which you can preset to black and white, high colour, sepia, night shot etc. The black and white results have been fantastic particularly when used in natural light, so much so that i have this as the default Manual setting and flick between automatic colour and manual black and white regularly with great results. The camera has photo-stitch and movie modes which again show great results.

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Camera use is excellent in natural light and flash photography results are good but take some getting used to using. There is a slight delay between focus and flash operation. Interface is easy to use with all main changes being selected via a wheel mechanism.

The camera comes with an 8mb Compact Flash card which is woeful and just enough to keep you going until the 128mb CF card arrives ! I would recommend buying a bigger card and buying the biggest you can. Memory is reducing in price all the time and 256 and 512mb cards are reasonably priced.

I tend to use the camera on the highest resolution for best printing results and with a 128mb card easily get 220 photos on there. This reduces with the use of movie clips (obviously) but there is plenty of room for photos even with a few 11 second clips.

Installing the software was tricky on Windows 98 and resulted in me making a support call. The support engineer resolved the problem very quickly and i was grateful as it was something i would have never figured out and nor was it documented in the installation guide i have. the only downside with the product so far! Now it is installed it has worked fantasticly with no problems.

All in all i would recommend this camera as a slightly above entry level camera. There are more powerful cameras (5 mega-pixels, 7x optical zoom) compared to 3.5 optical zoom with this camera but it does everything and how many people take much more than a happy snap photo of the kids or pets!