Consumer Product Review: Canon Powershot A570 is 7.1 MP Digital Camera

Canon has been making cameras for a long, long time, and thankfully, all that experience has translated into the burgeoning field of digital photography, as well. The moderately-priced but heavily-featured Canon Powershot A570 is an excellent all-around camera that you can carry in your purse or glovebox unobtrusively and which can provide excellent point and shoot characteristics. Weighing only 6.2 ounces, you'll hardly know that Canon's Powershot A570 is right there with you, ready when you are to capture the moments of your life you don't want to lose. Its 7.1 Megapixel resolution ensures that those pictures are free of the heavy graininess you'll find with lesser quality cameras, and a 4x optical and digital zoom keeps you close to the action even when you're sitting in the bleachers at your child's sports event.

The Canon Powershot features a 2.5" LCD screen, as well as a real-image zoom viewfinder. It has a self timer, continuous shooting speed of 1.7 frames per second, and comes with 16 MB of flash memory.

In comparison with other similar cameras, the Canon Powershot is a competent contender, requiring little initial preparation to actually use the camera. While some manufacturers seem to delight in making consumers trudge through chapters upon chapters of explanation as to what each individual icon means, the Canon Powershot is an extremely user-friendly camera that requires little trouble with the user manual, and more playing with the features to figure out how to use it.

Canon's Powershot A570 IS features Canon's exclusive Optical Image Stabilization, technology which significantly reduces the tendency of pictures to come out with the "shake" that you see so often with digital cameras. Rather than using sophisticated electronic trickery which can reduce the image quality of photographs, Canon uses a proprietary system called a "lens shift" optical system, which allows the lens itself to physically compensate for movement, even when that movement is exaggerated by the use of the telephoto lens or even low-light conditions.

Other features which are not included in the A550 digital camera include the use of Canon's DIGIC III image processor, which improves shutter times and was previously only available in upper-end digital cameras and Canon digital SLRs, Face detection technology, which traces and tracks faces by pushing the shutter halfway down, Red-eye detection, fourteen shooting modes including six special scene modes, and a movie mode, which includes VGA with 30 FPS or 15 FPS for up to an hour of shooting on 4GB, Fast frame rate, for 60 FPS up to one minute, or compact movie mode, which records at 15 FPS for up to three minutes. All together, the Canon Powershot A570 IS is a strong little camera at a great price, and comes highly recommended for both its features and quality, and purchasing one will never make you regret that you chose a Canon digital camera.