A great camera for a great price!

I owned a Canon Powershot A520 for almost two years, and I was getting really sick of it. I mean, it's a great little point-and-shoot camera, but my needs had outgrown the camera. And my particular camera had been used so much over its lifespan that the quality of the camera had decreased; I think I lost at least a full megapixel of quality by the time I replaced it with the A640. It was time.

The Canon Powershot A640 is an excellent camera. When I was looking around at cameras, I felt inclined to stay with the Canons, since I had the A520 and I have a wonderful 35mm Canon camera, and Canons also "run in my family." I was looking around at this and that, and I came across the 10-megapixel A640 and that was it. It was "the one."

The durability of the camera was evident immediately. I love how heavy it is in my hands! I might be alone in this, but I love a nice secure, heavy camera that fits well in my hands and feels sturdy. When a camera is too light, I feel as though I have a lower-quality product. It may seem silly, but I need that weight, and the A640 has it. It doesn't weigh 100 lbs, but it isn't flimsy either. It's a nice comfortable camera. The way it is designed to have a grip on the right side is wonderful. (Hey, don't they make left-handed cameras? I'm a righty, but that just occurred to me.) It managed to get its first "scar" just 5 days after I received the camera, but I think that's more my problem than Canon's. Eh, it has character, right?

The LCD was a huge improvement for me. My old one was 1.8 inches (or thereabouts) and this one is 2.5". I think that a 2.5" screen is the perfect size. 3" would almost be too big for me. The LCD is a little noisy, but it takes all of 10 minutes to get used to, and it doesn't affect the quality of the photos. It's a great little screen, and has a plastic (glass?) finish on it, which I always appreciate and Canon always delivers, though it does get smudgy quickly. I have become an obsessive lens-and-screen cleaner. The best thing about the LCD is, of course, the ability of it to pop out and swivel like a video camera LCD. This was the feature that put my decision to buy it over the top. It took only a couple of days to get used to having to pop out a screen, but it's already second-nature and this camera is still new to me. I love that the screen can close to prevent scratches when the camera is not being used. The angles the LCD can turn to have already come in handy for me, and if you think you won't use it - you will.

Battery life is excellent. Canon brags about high battery life on this one - and it's accurate bragging! Gasp! I have about a billion rechargeable NiMH batteries from all of my past cameras, and that's what I will always use. This camera uses 4 batteries instead of 2 (as my old one did) and it makes a huge difference. I am SO GLAD that it uses 4. This helps enormously with recharging the flash and menu/playback speeds. And the battery life is superb. Always have an extra set on hand just in case, though. Always!

This camera uses SD/MMC cards, which was something I was looking for. I wouldn't even consider any other kind of memory while I was looking, since I have so many SD cards and I didn't want to start over building up a store of cards. My primary card is a 2GB, and I think this camera needs at least a 1GB to use regularly. The file sizes are HUGE on the highest setting. I actually like that, since it allows for such great photo quality. But if you keep it on the highest setting (which I always do) then you&'re going to need a lot of memory for good shooting. I get 470 photos (not including video) on a 2GB card at the highest setting. I've had a few photos so far (using special settings, etc.) be 10MB each! Photo quality, by the way, is wonderful. 10 megapixels really does the trick! The photos are really superb, though get a little noisy past ISO 200, as everyone has pointed out in past reviews around the net for the last several months.

Speaking of special settings - my favorite fun features! Under Scene mode there are two choices that I had never seen before on a camera and kind of discovered by accident: Color Swap and Color Accent. Color Swap allows you to choose one color (any of millions of shades of color) by choosing it through the LCD screen and then choose another one to change it to. You can choose the level of exchange as well, ranging from +5 (that color and many of the ones close to it) to -5 (just that one RGB value). It's so cool! I prefer Color Accent though. It lets you choose a color in the same manor as Color Swap, and then take the photograph in black and white with just that one color showing. Again, you can choose how many similar colors you want included from +5 to -5. It' so incredibly cool! I can't wait to use this feature even more creatively. If I had known about these features in detail when choosing a camera, this also would have been the cherry on top of the ice cream.

Color Swap and Color Accent are also available in movie mode, which is incredibly amazing. The movie mode is incredible as it is (so clear and crisp!) and those two features being usable is very, very cool. Video has different size and quality settings as well; I have only used the best one. It's phenomenal.

The zoom feature is pretty average. Up to 4.0x optical and then 4.0x digital. The digital zoom isn't as horrible as some people have made it out to be. Most (if not all) of my zoomed images have been clear (as long as I wasn't shaking, lol). It's pretty average Canon fare. Nothing spectacular, nothing bad.

Playback is great. The little switch to change from record mode to play mode is nice and sturdy and easy to instinctively switch. There is a cool "jump to" feature on the camera, which allows you to jump to photos by the 10s, 100s, by date taken, by folder and the one I was most excited about - to movies. You can jump from movie to movie to watch them. This was always a big issue of mine on other cameras - having to sort through all of the images to get to the movies to watch them. But this makes it very easy! It's great. Playback is fast and efficient, and the LCD is a good facilitator to looking at photos taken.

Speed between shots is wonderful, especially compared to the A520. I think that was the final straw for me on the 520 - the between-shot lag was ridiculous. But the A640, with its 4 batteries and technological efficiency, is very speedy, even with flash. Without flash, you are able to take photo after photo quickly (without review turned on - mine is at 2 seconds and it's still wonderfully speedy), and with it, it's only a second and a half or two between shots. It's a HUGE improvement for me, and something I am so excited and relieved to finally have - great lack of lag! Shutter lag (from pressing to picture) is also great. Less than a half a second, even.

Now for my complaint. I am not a beginning photographer; I have experience with apertures, shutter speeds, etc. I'm not a professional, and I am not very old, but I know what I am doing. Well, this camera’s aperture only goes up to f/8.0. Now, this is totally workable for the most part. You can compensate EV values, etc. Shutter speeds range from 15” to 1/4000” – which is a great range. The only trouble I have had so far is trying to get slow-exposure water in the daytime. I can’t get the aperture past f/8 to get a properly exposed photo with a slow shutter speed (to make the water look silky). Beyond that, though, the small range of aperture values is workable. I suppose higher aperture values is what I have my 35mm for, right?

As for minor things – the strap the p-a-s Canons come with is included. It’s fine for its purpose. The camera’s size almost dictates an around-the-neck strap for me, but this strap will do. I always make sure to have it on the camera as well, as I am afraid of dropping it (or others dropping it!). The manual that comes with is the same as the one you can find online and is enormously helpful.

Overall, this camera is a gem. I look forward to many, many, many more exposures with it, and lots of good times captured through its lens. I definitely recommend this camera!