Canon Powershot A590 Review

The Canon PowerShot A590 is another intuitive digital camera from the Canon PowerShot line that is perfect for the point and click photographer who requires a camera that does most of the thinking for him. There's no shame in being such a camera user, at least I hope not, as I have been depending on Canon PowerShot to do just that for me for years. Having had the opportunity to play around with the Canon PowerShot A590 on a recent weekend trip after a relative bought one, I thought I would pass along my take on some of this particular model's features.

First things first, the Canon PowerShot comes equipped with 4x optical zoom and 8.0 mega-pixels. That 4x optical zoom is perfectly adequate for getting the perfectly squared shot of loved ones before a landscape, but this isn't the sort of equipment if you are seriously considering picking up wildlife or sports photography any time soon. I'm sure that there are plenty of tech and graphics hounds would strongly disagree, but the quality of picture resolution in terms of mega-pixels has reached the stage that there is little need for shopping making comparison between cameras based upon mega-pixels for the average home user. Rest assured that an eight mega-pixel image is well beyond the capability of your photo printer and probably your monitor to display in all its glory.

Of more importance to the casual photographer are all of the auto-sensing detection and correction technologies that Canon has fit into the PowerShot A590. Like many cameras before it, the Canon PowerShot A590 contains auto-correction for red-eye syndrome in portrait shots, making that eerie photo error a thing of the past. Also, the face detection technology automatically senses whether that are faces in the shot and focuses on them appropriately. If the object of the camera's focus moves while taking a picture, the motion detection technology automatically makes the necessary adjustments to ensure the clearest possible picture.

As most of the pictures that I take are for use online, the camera's on board editing options are some of my favorite features. The Canon PowerShot A590 allows you to make the small adjustments that might be necessary to make to a picture so that it's ready to plug and upload when you're ready to share them or post on blogs or websites. For instance the image inspection tool allows you to zoom in and make sure everything in your shot looks right, and the resizing tool lets you change the size of your photo to something compact enough for easy internet use.

Some other features worth mentioning are the 2" macro shot option, SD HC memory card use and VGA movie camera. All in all, I would not hesitate at recommending the Canon PowerShot A590 to anyone who needs good pictures but doesn't want to get too technical.