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Canon PowerShot A20 2MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom

Canon PowerShot A20 2MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom

List Price: $499.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Better image quality and battery usage than the Elph S100
Review: I had a Powershot Elph S100 and although I liked the small size I wanted something with more accurate colors, less of a blue cast, and better battery usage. The A20 fits the bill.

The colors on the A20 are great. They are more saturated and a lot more accurate than the Elph. I will no longer have to go in and filter out any blue casting.

Low light capabilities are better than the Elph with the exception of focus. The A20 automatically adjusts to ISO 150 in low-light which is something I don't think the S100 did. I notice the background in regular and slow-sync to show much more detail at night on the A20. I have however noticed less accurate focusing in low-light than the Elph. Pictures also tend to be a little grainier at times perhaps due to the higher ISO in low-light.

The battery life is great. I am using the AA batteries supplied with the camera and I have taken over 150 shots and used the LCD half of the time and I still have not received a battery warning. The batteries however are listed as "Industrial" Alkaline which may mean they have a much longer life than regular AA batteries.

I do miss the size of the Elph, the fact it looked just like a regular Elph2 camera, the rugged metal body, the anti-glare film on the LCD (the A20 has none), and the slick look of it. However, the A20 produces better pictures, has a much better underwater case (goes to a depth of about 100ft), and will last much longer on four AA batteries than the Elph did on its ... proprietary battery.

Of course, for a smaller camera there is always the S300 however it still uses the proprietary battery and is ... more. Plus, it is still bigger than the S100 was. The image quality of the S300 however should be the same as the A20 except that the S300 will focus better in low-light due to a better focus-assist lamp.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Batteries last long
Review: This camera is great. The quality is good, once you figure out what your doing. It's extremely simple to use and great camera for taking pictures of family and friends.

- HelpfulReviews.com

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Software not so great
Review: After owning the PowerShot A20 for about 6 months I love the camera, but hate the bundled software. On the hardware side everything is fine: the battery life is good, the picture quality is good. I use a 128MB Compact Flash card with the camera, which can store more than 400 pictures at medium resolution (1024x768), which is plenty good enough for posting on websites. The big downside is the software. Canon provides a Windows application called ZoomBrowser to use with the camera. It has lots of fancy graphics, and also lots of user interface problems. Although the ZoomBrowser interface can fill the screen only a very narrow band is dedicated to the pictures on the camera, making it difficult to see what you are working with. Whilst downloading the ZoomBrowser window constantly pops to the front, so you can't do any other work on your computer. The browser interface can get out of sync with the picture files on your hardrive, which is extremely confusing. Overall it is a bloated package which has lots of useless features, and does a very poor job of the one thing for which it is necessary -- downloading images. I did find a better solution -- for $10 you can buy the shareware Cam4You utilities from http://jpegclub.org/cam4you/. This program does a much better job of downloading pictures from the camera, without all the cruft. The interface is a little unpolished, but it functions much better than the Canon software.


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