Canon Powershot A610 5MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom – Customer Reviews

This camera is great overall when it works properly. There is a known issue where the lens will not retract (and it's not due to low battery).

Otherwise the quality and features are great but in all the research I did, I didn't find that info before I bought the camera.Of course it happened right after one year (no warranty coverage left).

Check the web - I did too late.

9/27/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:

I purchased this camera about six months ago after my Kodak Easyshare camera completely died on me. I did a little research and read only good things about this Canon camera so I decided to go with it because it was very reasonably priced (about $200). Not only did the camera live up to my expectations, it surpassed them by leaps and bounds! Here are the things I have loved about this camera:

BATTERY - this camera has the best battery of any digital camera I have ever owned or used. At first I was worried since it uses four AA batteries instead of two like my other cameras, but it was advertised to have a good battery life so I was hopeful. Let me tell you that I have had this camera about six months and have not had to change the batteries yet! And I use the camera quite a bit. I used it for church Vacation Bible School all week, youth weekend retreat, family vacation, pictures of friends and pets, all of this and the battery is still going strong! If I had not experienced this, I would not believe it was possible for any digital camera to do so well with batteries (my Kodak sucked the life out of batteries in a matter of just a few hours or less!)

EASY TO USE - I was able to sit down with the camera and figure out pretty much all of the functions in a very short period of time and with very little reference to the manual. (And I'm no technology expert).

PICTURE QUALITY - all of the pictures I've taken and printed out have been great. The camera is a 5.0MP camera and it does a great job for it's resolution I think. All my pictures have been sharp, clear, and great color.

FEATURES - I love the ability to quickly and easily change between outdoor, indoor, different lighting conditions, action vs. still shots, close-up, etc. And it makes a real difference in the quality of the pictures to be able to tell the camera what the conditions are of the picture you are trying to take.

LCD SCREEN - I was hoping to get a camera with a very large LCD screen, but quickly discovered that I like the swivel feature on this camera even more than having a huge LCD. Being able to swing the screen out and turn it around gives you that much more versatility in what pictures you can take. It revolutionized the "self-portrait" :)

SD MEMORY CARD - I was also looking for a camera that used SD memory cards. Mostly because that was what I'd used before and all of my other pictures were on SD Memory. So that was a big plus for me. That may be different for each person though depending on which type of media you are used to using.

I cannot stress how highly I recommend this camera. I will never buy another digital camera besides Canon again. And the A610 (as well as the A620 - the 7.0MP version) is the best digital camera I've ever used.

9/2/2006 12:00 AM | Rating: