A cheap, good camera. (Canon Powershot A470)

Member Name: Magik

Product:	Canon Powershot A470
Date:	05/10/08 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great value for money, quick shutter speed.

Disadvantages: Not very stylish; struggles to take good pictures in low light.

You don't need to pay a lot to get a pretty good digital camera. Solid budget models are becoming less expensive and offering better performance every year. The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples of this trend. With a price tag less than £150, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn't the prettiest camera available and it doesn't have any flashy features, but for the price, it's hard to beat.

Canon tries to give the A470 a much-needed injection of style by offering four color choices: gray, blue, red, and orange. Unfortunately, colorful accents can't hide the camera's chunky, unattractive design measuring almost 4 inches long, 2 inches thick, and more than an inch and a half wide. At 7.6 ounces with an SD card and two AA batteries, it also weighs in as one of the heftiest budget cameras available. On the bright side, the camera's large body makes it easy to grip and hold, and its wide design leaves room for large, simple controls that even bigger thumbs can comfortably manipulate.

The camera's 38-to-132mm-equivalent, f/3.0-5.8 lens offers a slightly longer than usual reach, but offers a narrower field of view than most snapshot cameras' 35mm-equivalent-or-wider lenses. A 2.5-inch, 115,000-pixel screen is the only method of framing your shot, and can be difficult to use on sunny days. It features the standard handful of scene preset modes, plus a movie mode that can record QVGA (320x240) movies at 30 frames per second, or VGA (640x480) movies at a slower-than-usual 20fps. Finally, the A470 includes face-detecting autofocus and autoexposure, an increasingly popular feature that's still a bit surprising to find on such an inexpensive model.

For the money, the Canon PowerShot A470 is a great digital camera. It doesn't work very well in low light, but that's a flaw shared by most snapshot cameras in general. If you want to spend as little cash as possible for a decent camera, the PowerShot A470 is one of the best choices currently available.

Summary: Want to spend as little cash as possible on a good camera? This is the one for you.

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