Canon PowerShot A610 is so Much Better Than the Canon PowerShot A75 Digital Camera

The Canon PowerShot A610 is so much better than the Canon PowerShot A75 Digital Camera. Canon as a company is very good in customer service long after the original purchase with free mechanical equivalent or better due to factory manufacturing error.

My father purchased for me a Canon PowerShot A75 Digital Camera for Christmas. I have always loved to do timed exposures on old fashioned camera and would have to wait a long time to look at the pictures. Now with instant feedback on my lights in the dark experiments, I have enormous abundance of fun with zero waste of film or money.

The next holiday season at the Honolulu Lights Christmas Parade, I captured parading band players festooned in glow-in-the-dark light sticks. On River Street where there is a slight bend in the road, exposed for eight seconds the oncoming parade band. The eerie image of wispy forms and distinct multi-colored lights in a seemingly well lit street which gives the appearance of a ghost march with onlookers staring from the sidewalks.

The A610 PowerShot is capable of 15 second exposure, which is much better than the eight second maximum exposure on the A75. On old style cameras, there was a "B", for button exposure as long as the button was depressed the lens aperture will remain open. The electronic noise that exponentially increases with longer exposures times in digital camera limits the maximum exposure duration.

With the A610 on a tripod in my kitchen and just as an experiment, tried to write my name with a lit incense stick but my handwriting was atrocious. I grabbed my two bicycle lights in each hand and turned the LED to flashing mode. Making fencing motions with my Florentine style laser sabers the result was a line of white dashes.

Pointing the laser directly towards the camera results in a PhotoShop style dashed line across the image. A following attempt at always keeping the light pointing away from the camera and moving in close to an reflective object results in a modern version of a Victorian Phantasm. During the 15 second exposure, I quickly moved like a hovering butterfly while trying to point around the same spot from different angles in order to avoid the blurry shadow of myself.

Now you know why I tried this in the privacy of my kitchen rather than in a public place. Link below for more pictures as a slide show.

The Canon A610 has greater capacity in all the features that the A75 possess and some new easier to use features. The LCD can be flipped on the A610 which is great for filming a Chinese New Year parade from a monopod held high above the crowd.

The best feature is the one for aging eyes. In manual focus macro mode, the viewfinder is magnified for even better focusing. I have used the camera like a microscope, taking a picture of miniature circuitry in order to zoom into the image in play mode looking for an electrical short.