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Canon PowerShot A5
A digital camera is a very useful tool, as well as an addictive toy. Web publishers find them the ultimate in convenience, as you can snap a picture, load it into the computer, and slap it right onto a Web page, skipping the time- and money-consuming steps of film processing and scanning. The freedom from film is a boon to experimentation, as you can snap and snap without worrying about wasting film. The instant gratification of being able to view your pictures on a built-in LCD makes this little guy a big hit at parties, and everyone who sees it seems to want one.
Canon PowerShot A5: $500
Canon USA, Inc.
One Canon Plaza
Lake Success NY 11042
757-413-2848
The Canon PowerShot A5 occupies the middle ground between low-resolution toys and more full-featured "pro" models. It's an extremely well-designed product that does its job very well. It's packed with convenient and nifty features, but it has a few limitations that make it unsuitable for serious professional use.
The main drawbacks to the Canon PowerShot A5 have to do with flexibility, or rather the lack of it. It's a fully automatic camera - you can't manually adjust the focus, shutter speed, aperture or any of the other parameters that professional photogs need to access (Actually, there is an Exposure Compensation feature that allows you to preselect different exposure levels, giving you a limited amount of control over exposure). Also, the Canon PowerShot A5 doesn't allow you to use any add-on lenses, filters or flashes.
If you don't need any of these features, however, I think you'll find that the PowerShot works like a charm. Photo quality is good, it works well in a variety of lighting conditions, and unlike many other digital cameras, it can store lots of photos and the built-in rechargeable battery runs for a long time on a single charge. It's very small (4.0 x 2.7 x 1.3 inches), so you can slip it into a pocket easily.
The PowerShot comes with a battery pack and charger, as well as an AC adapter. Images are stored on a removable CF card, which is about the size of a pack of matches. The FC-8M which comes with the PowerShot (FC-4M and FC-15M models also available) stores from 8 to 236 photos, depending on the image quality selected. The back sports an LCD panel which can be used to view pictures stored in the camera, and can also provide a real-time display that can be used in lieu of the viewfinder. The LCD also displays menus that are used for setting the various parameters.
One thing that takes a little getting used to is that the Canon PowerShot A5 doesn't snap a picture immediately upon pressing the shutter button (this is an annoying but inevitable trait of most digital cameras). You have to press the button, wait about two seconds until a little light comes on, then press again to snap the shot. It takes the camera about three seconds to store the picture and get ready for another shot.
Any of the pictures stored in the camera can be displayed on the LCD, and you can delete any or all at will. When you're ready to upload your masterpieces, you connect the camera to your computer's serial port using the included adapter cord, and acquire them using the included TWAIN software. Ulead's PhotoImpact image-editing software comes bundled with the Canon PowerShot A5, but the TWAIN acquiring software works just fine with Photoshop (and presumably with any other TWAIN-compatible image editor).
The Canon PowerShot A5 offers five different quality levels. The best quality stores photos in an uncompressed raw CCD format at a 1024 x 768 resolution (940 KB per photo). The other options use JPEG compression, and either 1024 x 768 or 512 x 384 resolution. I found the second-best quality level to be pretty darn good, with a file size of 180 KB. As you can store 44 pictures on the included FC-8M card, I never saw any reason to fool with the lower quality options.
When the flash is set to Auto mode, the camera decides when and if the flash is necessary. The flash can also be set to On or Off modes, and there is also a Red-eye Reduction mode. There's a self-timer, a Macro mode (useful for close-ups, similar to using a macro lens). The Stitch Assist mode makes it easier to take separate images of a panorama that won't fit into a single frame, and then stitch them together into a seamless image using editing software. The camera keeps track of the date and time, can display the menu in English, German, French or Japanese…whew! The nifty little features go on and on.
Professional photographers need to be able to manually set shutter speeds and aperture size, and they need to be able to use different lenses and filters. These erstwhile ladies and gentlemen will need to pony up $1,000 or more for one of the higher-level digital cams, like those offered by Kodak and Olympus. Most Web publishers, however, will find the Canon PowerShot A5 to be more than adequate, at an attractive price of around $500. If you need to take photos of products for an online catalog, houses for an online real estate database, or perhaps just establish a Web presence for your dog or cat, you'll find this little gem to be a great tool.
These two photos were taken at the second-best quality level (JPEG 1024 x 768), and acquired into Photoshop. I cropped and resized them, but did no other processing.
