An excellent introduction into digital photography (Canon Powershot A60)

Member Name: Monophobia

Product:	Canon Powershot A60
Date:	16/10/06 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Manual options for professional results, acceptable results in automatic mode.

Disadvantages: No manual focus.

I spent a total of two years studying photography as part of my HND courses back in the late '80s/early '90s and learned (as every budding photographer must) an appreciation for depth of field, colour temperature, appropriate use of flash, film speed, composition etc and subsequently could not bear to use automatic cameras or cheap, fixed-focus cameras. I'm a photography snob. When digital cameras started materialising several years later, I took no notice. They couldn't possibly match the quality of film.

In more recent years I started doing photography for my band websites and album covers but my wife needed a simpler camera to use for her work as an architect, and my rickety old SLR was falling apart anyway. So in 2003 our very early Christmas present to ourselves was a digital camera. We needed a decent quality digital camera that would give me an acceptable amount of manual control but give my wife the option to just point and shoot. All this on a budget of around £200. The Canon A60 came recommended to me by a colleague who was a photographer's wife. After checking a few reviews on the web and looking for the cheapest deal, I finally ordered this from Pixmania (terrible company, but that's another review altogether) with a case, some rechargeable batteries and an additional 128mb memory card (vital as you're only given about 16mb to start with).

Of course, at 2 megapixels this is not really 35mm resolution, even with the pictures at maximum size, but what pixels are there are used exceptionally well by Canon's 3x optical zoom lens, and we have had some classic shots printed onto real photographic paper up to 6"x4" with no significant difference in quality. Printing at 5"x7" the difference from film becomes more noticeable, but as long as the shot is correctly lit there are no objectionable compression artifacts (blocky pixelisation) and apart from being slightly softer than 35mm film, I was surprised at how vibrant and colourful the results are. If you're intending to print any larger than this and you're particular about image quality then you will obviously need more megapixels.

Manual users are able to create a virtual film speed and set the digital filter to the correct colour temperature and lighting conditions. Exposure (shutter speed) defaults to automatic, but if you want to overexpose or underexpose the shot for some reason then you have the option to tweak the settings to get the shot darker or lighter as required.
You can also switch between shutter speed priority or aperture priority, which gives you some measure of control over depth of field.

Focus is not manual at all, but it is possible to set up the autofocus to work in different ways and to focus on different areas of the picture. You can screw in a telephoto lens or lens adaptor to the a60 but you won't get any direct focus control, which is just as well as the viewfinder and the LCD screen are not very precise.

Another nice little option is the movie mode, which captures a few minutes of sound and vision, which can later be output to PAL or NTSC TV/VCR, or converted to DVD when you upload the files to your PC. Obviously the quality is not great, but in the absence of a video camera some of the moments that we have captured with the A60 have been priceless.

Almost 3 years later, the camera still works as well as ever with no probs and we are still very happy with it. We've captured some priceless pics and movies of holidays and of our new baby daughter, as well as being a regular tool in my wife's architectural work, band shots for my music websites, album cover images and eBay listings.

I don't know if they're still available new (2 megapixels was superceded very quickly after I bought mine) but you can pick up a used model for around £70 through Amazon, or else I'd recommend anything with similar functions from Canon.

Summary: A superb digital camera for the 2 megapixel range.

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