What is it?
The A2300 is one of Canon's powershot range of compact cameras.

Looks:
While not the most stylish, this camera isn't ugly. In size it's a little bigger than a credit card and about 1cm deep. the back half of the camera is black and the front half comes in a variety of colours such as black, silver, pink and blue, while the lens is a silver colour.

The screen on the rear is 2.7" which is on the smaller side of average nowadays, none the less it is perfectly big enough to see properly and the buttons are all arranged to the right of the LCD - they're large and well labelled. While turned off the camera lens is recessed into the body of the camera, but springs forth when turned on.

The plastic casing is reasonable - you can tell it's not an expensive camera from the feel, but it certainly doesn't feel to cheap and tacky.

Ease of use:
I have to say I think this is one of the easier to use digital compact cameras on the market at the moment. Gone are the days of focus free one touch images from 35mm compacts, but this camera is about as simple as they get now - it does have numerous buttons, but they're all large and well labelled so it doesn't take long to work your way round it.

The camera comes set to automatic mode - this is a scene detect automatic so the majority of the time you wouldn't take it out of this mode, however you can change modes by pressing the green auto button and selecting from the menu which comes up on the LCD, with shooting options such as fisheye and black and white.

If you want to you can put the camera onto 'P' (program mode) and adjust settings such as the exposure compensation, ISO and white balance. Personally I find this gives the user a few options to fiddle with while not being too overwhelming.

Picture quality:
This camera has a 5x optical zoom with 20x digital available - the quality across the optical range is good, but once you go into the digital range it gets really soft and fuzzy like a webcam, I really wouldn't recommend you use it.

That said in general the picture quality is pretty decent for a camera of this level - sharpness is fair, colour is pretty accurate and contrast is good.

Video quality:
Definition of video here is 720HD. There's a one touch record button on the rear and the camera automatically goes into widescreen - the quality I found to be pretty impressive when staying zoomed out, the panning was nice and smooth and sound level captured was good. You can zoom up to 4x when videoing which is does slowly to stop it jumping and keep focus better, however it does increasingly lose defintion as you zoom in so I wouldn't really use this aspect of it. The only other downside I can mention here is that the mic is placed in the top right corner of the camera where you tend to place your finger to hold the camera.

What else?
The LCD isn't the best resolution - it's a little bit on the fuzzy side which is a shame, but of course it doesn't affect the image quality and this is one of the things you tend to sacrifice when buying a lower price camera.

There is a burst mode available, but this is very slow at what seemed to me to be around 1 frame per second (without flash). When on single shot mode it takes around 4 seconds for the camera to be ready between images, but on the plus side the camera does respond quickly to a press of the shutter button.

Minimum focusing distance is around 3cm so not the closest for compacts, but still pretty good.

There is a useful built in guide/menu which comes in the form of the ? button on the cameras rear - this means you don't always need to take a paper manual out with you.

Going through the menus there is a date stamp option which seems to appeal to alot of the older generation in my experience. In the retouch menu you can adjust contrast, remove red eye and resize images. Furthermore the camera is set to auto rotate images on playback, but you can turn off this feature if desired.

Price:
You can pick this camera up for around £100 in a shop and sellers on amazon are doing it around the £75 mark at the moment.

I would recommend this camera for...
This is of course a generalisation but I would say that children, teenagers and older people would get on well with this camera due to it's simplicity and the colour choices available.

I wouldn't recommend this camera for...
Anyone who wants a camera with a large zoom or manual options. This is a simple point and shoot camera - not one you're going to grow into.

Brief specifications:
- 16mp
- 2.7" LCD
- Lithium ion battery
- 28mm wide lens with 5x optical and 20x digital zoom