Canon Powershot A620 Digital Camera Review

Review: Canon Powershot A620 Digital Camera image

The Canon PowerShot A620 is in fact the follower of the much appreciated Canon A95 providing quite a lot of features for an entry level digital camera usually found on more expensive devices. The 620 is the flagship of the A series from Canon and represents a very attractive choice of digital camera, combining its medium compact design with high-end features and a low price. Featuring 20 different shooting modes, the A620 can be used successfully as a point-and-shoot camera but allows a lot of creativity with its aperture-priority, shutter-priority and full manual shooting modes.

The camera also features a great 2 inch LCD that can be rotated and flipped. 4 AA Alkaline batteries assure a more than decent operating time for the camera. The Canon A620 also features some interesting accessories such as external High-Power Flash, telephoto and wide-angle lenses and even a waterproof case for the underwater photography.

The image quality can even outclass some higher-end models and due to its fast auto-focus and exposure flexibility the camera can practically handle any situation an amateur photographer might come across with. The A620 produces clean and detailed but a little unsharp results. Fortunately, they respond very well to sharpening techniques in post-processing. Colors are natural and a less over-saturated than its predecessor, the A95. Improvements were brought to the auto-focusing system that is now able to focus correctly 498 times out of 500.

The camera can also shoot short films at a maximum size of 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second. It can also shoot smaller-sized movies (320x240) but at a higher frames-per-second rate (60fps). The movies present only few compression artifacts but can suffer from quality drops whenever the 3x digital zoom is used, since the optical zoom is unusable when the camera is used in this mode. Filming at the best quality can need up to 1.7MB for every second of film and therefore require fast, high-capacity SD cards.

Recommendation:

Featuring a completely different and better sensor as well as the powerful DIGIC II image processor, the Canon A620 is a worthy successor of the much acclaimed A95. With its impeccable image quality and multitude of functions, the camera is ideal for those wanting to learn the ropes of photography while remaining an affordable camera.

It has its downsides such as the lack of a change-ISO button and some rare exposure issues but the overall impression is that of an almost perfect compact digital camera.

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