Canon seem to have stopped the factories, and the shops are running dry of Canon’s über-compact does-it-all wünderkind. (How many umlauts can I stick in a single sentence?) It has all gone very quiet from Canon, which can only mean one thing: Everybody’s favourite compact is getting an upgrade (or should I say üpgrade?)

It’s a bit of a long story involving mine and my brother’s annual jaunt to a music festival and needing some pictures for a book, but last week I was desperate to lay my grubby mitts on the aforementioned pocket-sized snapperbox capable of shooting in RAW. If I were borrowing one, I would’ve taken anything that was sent my way, but given that I was actually prepared to lay down about £350 on this, the Canon S95 was my camera of choice. What can I say? I’m a devoted Canon fangirl. (And as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been a bad review of the S95 yet.)

Searching high and low

And so the hunt began. First stop, John Lewis, that glorious flagship of middle-class shopping extravaganza. The audio visual team at the Oxford Street store are awesome, and if everything goes mammaries-up, their aftersales is splendid. I looked online, no S95s in stock. Odd, but oh well. So I called them. The entire company doesn’t have a single S95 available. Not a one.

Onwards to Amazon.co.uk. They only have a single one available. Amazon.com still has a few, but they don’t ship to the UK, so that wasn’t going to happen either.

So, in the company of my long-suffering father, I trudged along the High Street in the town close to the Small Aperture country retreat. Did any one of the electrical retailers there have an S95? Nope. One shop checked its system for me and informed me that they’ve discontinued it and none of their stores has it in stock.

So what the blazes is going on with the Canon S95?

My immediate reaction was that perhaps Canon has been struggling in the aftermath of the horrible tsunami and the S95 has come unstuck because of it. But, being the inquisitive sod that I am, I asked Canon what the deal with the S95 is, and they are declining to get back to me with the full details.

Is there a something else going on here? A something that might be an S99 in the near future, perhaps?