The Canon Ixus 1100 HS is the latest evolution of Canon’s touchscreen compact camera. It comes along offering a 12-megapixel backlit CMOS sensor, their DIGIC 4 processor and 12x (28-336mm in 35mm terms) zoom lens.

All this is packed into a body that will slip easily into your pocket. It isn’t the slimmest camera around, but with a lens like that, we’re impressed that it’s as compact as it is.

There is a downside, of course, which is the relatively slow lens, although for the majority of the compact camera crowd, the F/3.4 max aperture probably won’t be a problem.

Being a touchscreen model there is little by way of controls, the rear offering up the 3.2-inch 16:9 display, with an adequate 461k-dots, and a solitary playback button beside it.

The saving grace comes in the form of a sliding switch on the top of the camera which will let you move between Auto shooting and everything else. This means that when the chips are down you can flick into Auto and shoot away without thinking about it; you don’t have to head back to a mode selector on-screen to get out of whatever convoluted shooting set-up you might be in.

Of course half the fun of using a camera is digging into those crazy shooting modes and the Canon offers bundles. A whole range of effects are packed in, including the fashionable miniature mode, various smile shutters and every scene mode you could imagine.

The Canon Ixus 1100 HS exudes quality in its build, the body feeling reassuringly sturdy and we can’t help feeling that the slightly squared, bold looks have something of a retro Eastern Bloc charm to them.

Although the menus are simple and easy to use, and the screen perfectly responsive to our prods, the user interface isn’t quite as vibrant and as engaging as you’ll find on some other models.

Nevertheless, this being Canon you can expect good performance too, so we’d expect it to be a popular camera this Christmas. Hitting shelves in October, the Ixus 1100 HS has an SRP of £369.

Of course, we’ll be bringing you a full review of the Canon Ixus 1100 HS as soon as we can.