Canon Powershot A620

I've always liked Canon's digital cameras and the Powershot A620 is no exception. It's a lovely 7.1m pixel compact camera which is now retailing online for less than £200. Sure it's by no means a small camera, it's rather bulky, owing to it's use of 4x AA batteries but it's still a very good camera. If you're looking for a camera that takes stunning pictures and runs on standard batteries then you can't go far wrong with the A620.

The A620 has a really satisfying number of settings considering it's a 'low end' camera. There are the auto and preset settings but also a number of manual settings. The macro mode is very crisp all the way up to as close as 1cm. The overall shooting quality is also superb. The lens is a decent size for this type of camera and provides the CCD with good levels of light. As always the Canon post processing is also excellent. The only thing I wonder is if 7.1mp isn't a little bit of overkill for this camera (the new A700 is a 6mp). Either way I suppose you could down the resolution if you wanted to save space. On the other hand 7.1mp is ideal if you want to print posters!

The video settings are quite good too. 640x480 at 30fps is the top end and 320x240 at 15fps is the bottom end with a mixture of the two in between. The video file format is a motion JPEG which provides decent quality for short clips. There was a problem playing the files in Windows Media Player but Quicktime handled them no problem at all. The max video file size is totally dependent on the size of your CF card.

Overall the camera is very satisfying to use. It uses Canon's DIGIC II processor and is very responsive. The swivel LCD might not be everyone's cup of tea but the ability to turn the LCD toward the camera when not in use certainly helps reduce the chance of horrible LCD scratches.

I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for a decent camera to make the switch to digital or if you want to replace an aging early generation digital camera.

For an in depth review check out: Digital Photography Review