Reviewing the Canon PowerShot A620 Digital Camera

The Canon PowerShot A 620 is a powerful and inexpensive camera, for those who don't mind the bulk. My friend had an earlier version of this camera, and upon seeing it I was blown away. Not only does it take consistently good pictures, but it is equipped with all sorts of features, including both useful things, like the ability to take short video clips, and less useful things, like the ability to eliminate all color from a picture except, say, red. With 7 megapixels, it has all the resolution the average user could want and more, and its 4x optical zoom is quite suitable for most people's needs. Although it does not have the sleek, pocket-sized body that some modern digital cameras have, it takes amazing pictures and, selling for around $180, is remarkably cheap.

The A 620 comes with most of the features a person could want. It has all sorts of image presets, allowing people to take good pictures at night, on the beach, in the snow, of quickly moving objects, and in all sorts of other specific situations. For those who want to mess with settings themselves, it allows you to mess with shutter speed, aperture, flash settings, and film speed equivalent. It is capable of taking short movies clips, which is a nice feature for documenting amusing moments. The one feature the PowerShot A 620 lacks is auto-stabilization, a relatively new feature on high end cameras that allows you to take crisp pictures even in low light. Blurry low light pictures would be my one complaint about this camera. When it detects that you are in a low light situation, it automatically sets itself for a longer shutter speed, which, while allowing you to avoid taking dark pictures, makes it difficult to do so without a tripod.

Bulkiness is the PowerShot A 620's other major problem. Unlike some cameras, including many others in the PowerShot series, the A 620 has a bit of weight to it, making it difficult for it to ride in your pocket. Its four AA batteries serve to weigh it down, while on the other hand allowing on-the-fly battery swapping, which is nice if you are traveling. The A 620 takes SD cards, which are much cheaper (and therefore better) than XD cards. It comes with only a 32 MB card, though, which won't be sufficient to anyone's purposes. Buy one with at least 512 MB of storage, if not 1 GB. If you shop, you won't need to spend more than $30.

All in all, this is a very good camera, and comes with my strong recommendation. Its features, image quality, and accuracy of color set it apart from other cameras in its price range, and make it really difficult to take bad pictures. If you need a digital camera, this may very well be the way to go.