A surprisingly good little camera!
Written: Aug 25 '01
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Pros: Great overall feature set at an attractive price, uses CF.
Cons: The usual: Better cameras are now available for around the same price.
The Bottom Line: For $400, it's a great little camera compared to the competition. However, do the research on the latest models, since the digital camera marketplace changes quickly.
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| stachoni's Full Review: Canon PowerShot A20 Digital Camera |
I bought the Canon Powershot A20 last June, the night before leaving on a vacation to the Caribbean (or is it pronounced "Caribbean?"). Anyway, I'd been jonesing for a digital camera for some time. Usually I'd steal, er, "borrow" the one from the work, but I was going to be gone for 10 days, which wouldn't work out. So I started doing some research, and ran up against the clock in actually buying one. Finally I went to Circuit City, spent a good hour interrogating the sales clerks on the different models in the same price range (about $400), said the hell with it, and just picked it up. It turned out to be the best impulse buy I've made in a while. Way better than that Electric Cat Polisher from Sharper Image, anyway.
It comes with 8MB of CF memory, which is good for about 10 pictures at 1600x1200 (the maximum resolution). 8MB is pretty much standard on digicams until the price of CF drops to the point where camera manufacturers can provide more for the same money. You can save memory and take more shots at a lower resolution, but the CCD in the camera is 2.1 Megapixels and is meant to take pics at its native resolution of 1600x1200. It interpolates the shot to other resolutions, thus the clarity of the resulting picture suffers.
Besides, CF memory is pretty cheap - another really good reason to go with this camera over competing models. I also have a Compaq iPaq PDA, which uses CF memory, a CF adapter for my PCs, and our digital camera at work also uses CF, so I can freely swap memory cards with these devices. It's pretty cool to take a ton of pics, then transfer them to the iPaq's memory, which frees up the memory card for more shots. Even so, I bought a 64MB card for an additional $100 (current prices for CF have dropped considerably). I took about 100 shots total on a single 64MB card. All at the lowest highest quality settings, too.
The camera features 3X optical zoom (the kind provided by the lens) and 8x "digital" zoom, which means that the image is processed electronically to suit. 8X digital zoom sounds nice, but image quality suffers as a result, so the number's pretty meaningless. 3X zoom was adequate - this isn't a professional model, after all.
You have a good array of compression options available, which work to maximize the image quality for the least amount of memory, resulting in more shots per CF card. A helpful chart in the documentation will tell you how many shots you can expect on different CF card sizes given the various image compression settings made.
The camera has a decent (if somewhat small) LCD on the back for previewing images. Setup and configuration is straightforward and pretty simple to do w/o reading the manual (which I didn't do until I was back from vacation, btw). The menu navigation is somewhat tedious to use, but is eminently usable. I appreciated the ability manually override settings for exposure, however shutter speed was not adjustable, resulting in the inability to do certain special effects I was after. Oh well.
The controls are very easy to use, both for someone with large hands (e.g., me) and small hands (e.g., my wife). The weight is light, but not so light as to appear flimsy. The body feels solid in the hands, unlike some other cameras I researched which felt much more "plasticy." It comes with a USB cable for connecting to the PC, so you better have a Mac, Windows 98, ME or Windows 2000 to download the images. Linux drivers are not included, unfortunately.
The included software bundle is Canon's TWAIN (Technology Without An Interesting Name) driver, and their picture librarian, ZoomBrowser FX. The TWAIN driver works with the computer's operating system and any TWAIN aware image editor/viewer. I use ACDSee for image viewing, which works great w/the TWAIN driver. The ZoomBrowser library software is difficult and confusing to use, however, and IMHO isn't worth installing. I'd rather store the images as separate files via ACDSee than as whole "databases." However, some people may find this stuff useful. Maybe.
Overall, I think the A20's image quality is great - 2.1MP is what I consider the lowest resolution you want in a digital camera, great for prints up to about 7x9 inches. If you want larger prints, I would go for a 3MP camera minimum. Luckily, since I bought this model, cameras have continued to improve offering more Megapixels for your hard earned dollar.
But hey, don't take my word for it - check out my online photo gallery of the vacation here:
http://www.picturetrail.com/gallery/view?p=6&uid=153150&.
All shots posted were taken w/the A20, with no post-processing Photoshop silliness required.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 400
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Epinions.com ID:
stachoni
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Member: Matt Stachoni
Location: Varies almost daily
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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