Canon PowerShot A470 Review
The successor to last year’s successful entry-level PowerShot A460, the new 7.1 megapixel A470 model has undergone a striking external makeover, matched dramatically by a number of key internal enhancements. The PowerShot A470 is a stylish and compact model over a contoured metallic finish body that highlights the camera’s new design and reflects the camera user’s individuality, personality and taste.
Solid budget models are becoming less expensive and offering better performance every year. The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples of this trend. With a price tag of only P6,500, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn’t the prettiest camera available and it doesn’t have any flashy features, but for the price, it’s hard to beat.
The camera’s large body makes it easy to grip and hold, and its wide design leaves room for large, simple controls that even bigger thumbs can comfortably manipulate.
The camera’s 38-to-132mm-equivalent, f/3.0-5.8 lens offers a slightly longer than usual reach, but offers a narrower field of view than most snapshot cameras’ 35mm-equivalent-or-wider lenses. A 2.5-inch, 115,000-pixel screen is the only method of framing your shot, and can be difficult to use on sunny days. You won’t find a lot of controls on the A470, but adjustable ISO, exposure controls, and manual white-balance settings offer some flexibility when shooting. It features the standard handful of scene preset modes, plus a movie mode that can record QVGA (320×240) movies at 30 frames per second, or VGA (640×480) movies at a slower-than-usual 20fps. Finally, the A470 includes face-detecting autofocus and autoexposure, an increasingly popular feature that’s still a bit surprising to find on such an inexpensive model.
Despite a very slow flash, the A470 proved to be a surprisingly fast shot. In certain lab tests, the camera took 2.1 seconds from power-on to first shot, and could capture a new picture every 1.4 seconds after with the flash disabled. With the onboard flash turned on, however, that wait exploded to 5 seconds. With a high-contrast (bright light) target, the camera’s shutter lagged a respectable 0.5 second, and with a low-contrast (low-light) target, the shutter lagged a truly remarkable 0.9 second. Most cameras, especially budget models, tend to lag over a second when shooting subjects in low light. Between the low shutter lag and long flash recycle time, the A470 proves bittersweet in low light. While it can snap a shot very quickly at first, you’ll be waiting a while before it can fire the flash again. Finally, the A470’s continuous shooting mode captured 30 7-megapixel shots in 33 seconds for a rate of 0.9 frame per second.
Noise mars the A470’s otherwise very nice pictures. Grain starts to appear at ISO 200, and becomes quite noticeable at ISO 400. From ISO 800 to the camera’s maximum sensitivity of ISO 1,600, fuzz saturates the picture, giving everything a felt-like texture. Besides the noise, however, the camera’s pictures look good. Fine details appear crisp and clear, especially for a P6,500 camera. Minor barrel distortion appears on the edges of pictures at the widest lens position, but it doesn’t seriously hurt picture quality. Colors look generally neutral, though they sometimes appear slightly cooler than usual. If you keep sensitivity low, the A470 will produce good-looking prints. Even at higher ISO settings, pictures look clear enough to e-mail or post to the Web.
For the money, the Canon PowerShot A470 is a great digital camera. The chunky, P6,500 shooter doesn’t have many bells or whistles, but it shoots quickly in brighter light and produces very nice-looking pictures. It doesn’t work very well in low light, but that’s a flaw shared by most snapshot cameras in general. If you want to spend as little cash as possible for a decent camera, the PowerShot A470 is one of the best choices currently available.
Powershot A470 Features:
• 7-Megapixel CCD imager and 3.4x optical zoom lens
• Widescreen still photo option, create images that are ideal for 16:9 viewing
• 2.5″ color LCD display with 100% frame coverage
• Advanced TTL AiAF 9-point autofocus system with focus-assist lamp
• Canon’s Genuine Face Detection Technology
• Auto, 10 Scenes and a Manual exposure mode
• Movie mode w/sound 640×480/320×240 (Max clip size up to 4GB or 60 minutes)
• Continuous shooting at 1.9fps to the capacity of the memory card
• Evaluative, Center-weighted average or Spot metering
• Exposure compensation: +/-2EV in 1/3-step increments
• White Balance: Auto, 5 presets or Custom
• My Colors: Vivid Color, Neutral, Sepia, B&W, and Custom color
• Shutter speeds of 15 to 1/2000 second
• Selectable ISO settings from 80 to 1600
• Runs on two standard AA type batteries
• Direct print and PictBridge Compliant
• USB 2.0 connectivity for PC and Mac
• Secure Digital/MMC card storage, 32MB MMC supplied
See specs at: Canon PowerShot A470
Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/canon-powershot-a470-red/4505-6501_7-32826182.html
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