Nice, Easy and Enjoyable to Use Digital Camera

I got Canon PowerShot A530 digital camera as an anniversary present, and I love it.

I love taking photographs (as an amateur), but I’ve never used a digital camera before. Learning to use Canon A530 was no problem at all, I barely had to read the instructions. Yes, it’s that easy to figure out.

Getting a little technical

Now, some technical details, for those of you who are interested in such things: Canon PowerShot A530 is a 5.3 Megapixel digital camera. It has a 4x optical zoom, 1.8-inch LCD screen, 22 shooting modes (Full Auto, Program and Manual Mode, and Scene Modes). It also has zooming optical viewfinder, Canon Digic Image Processor, 9-point AiAF auto focus, 1-point auto focus and manual focus. The pictures are stored on Secure Digital or MultiMedia memory cards, 16MB memory card is supplied, but I also have a 512MB memory card, and that’s the one I use. The connection to the PC and Mac computers is USB 2.0-high speed, but it’s also possible to print pictures directly, without a computer, with PictBridge compatible printers. The camera uses two AA batteries; I got two alkaline batteries with the camera, but was told that NiMH batteries were recommended.

The camera description

This camera has a nice silver body which is convenient enough to hold. The lens is retractable, it extends when the camera is turned on, retracts when the camera is turned off, and then the lens cover closes. On the top deck are the on/off button, a zoom rocker, large shutter release button and a large rotating mode dial. The mode dial can be set to Auto mode (the camera does it all itself – that’s the mode I use almost all the time), Program mode, different Scene modes and to Manual mode. On the side of the camera is a rubber cover, under which there are a USB jack, A/V jack and a DC power input.

On the rear are a 1.8-inch LCD monitor, an optical zooming viewfinder, control buttons and the review/shoot switch. On the bottom is the memory card/battery compartment lid.

Canon A530 is not one of those cute thin cameras which can serve you as a fashion detail; it’s body is more solid, though not so much to make the camera too heavy or uncomfortable to hold, and the pictures you can make with it are better than the ones you’d get with a cute thin camera within the similar price range (the price of my Canon A530 was about 200$).

Taking pictures with Canon PowerShot A530

The quality of the pictures is rather good; not good enough for the Vogue cover, perhaps, but great for usual photo albums. My boyfriend is a civil engineer, and he used this camera to make pictures of some buildings and of some materials – and the pictures were good enough to be put in a catalogue and shown to potential clients of his firm.

I’m not a camera expert, nor am I a professional photographer, so I probably can’t give you all the details about this camera. What I can tell you is that I’ve used it both with and without flash, both for indoors and outdoors pictures, and I was happy with the results. The pictures are sharp and all the colors are visible. This camera takes some two seconds to power on. If you don’t need to use the flash, you’ll have to wait about two seconds between taking different images, and with the usage of flash the interval is four to ten seconds. The focusing takes less than a second, the zooming from wide angle to telephoto may take two to three seconds.

When you want to take a picture, you press the shutter release button halfway to make the camera focus, and what you see on LCD screen is 100% what the picture would look like; on the LCD screen you’ll also see where the camera focused (it’s marked by one or more green rectangles). Then you press the shutter release button all the way and the picture is taken. So far, Auto mode was good enough for all of my needs (the camera sets all the parameters automatically), except in low-light surroundings; it was necessary to use Night Scene mode in those situations.

The flash is sufficient at up to 10-12 feet away. The recycle time depends on subject distance and battery charge, and can be between four and ten seconds.

Once you want to transfer the pictures to your computer, there’s a USB connection, and the pictures will be transferred really quickly. If you have Windows XP installed on your computer, you don’t need any additional software; if you don’t have Windows XP, Canon recommends that you install the software you get with the camera first.

There are other possibilities with this camera, but I haven’t used them yet, so I can’t tell you anything about them. Mostly, I just take pictures of people, animals and things I find interesting, then keep them on computer or on my blog, or send them to my friends and family.

The Complaints

I don’t have many complains when it comes to Canon PowerShot A530. One is the sometimes long interval between the shots (it only happens when using flash is necessary). The other is short battery life – switching the camera on and off and using flash seem to eat them up. The alkaline batteries I got with the camera lasted me for some 60 pictures only, so I strongly recommend using rechargeable NiMH batteries.

All in all…

All in all, I really like this camera. It’s easy and comfortable to use, it’s small enough I can carry it wherever I want, and the pictures are good-looking. Being just an amateur when it comes to photography, that’s all I want from a digital camera.