Canon PowerShot A720 IS Digital Camera

I like this camera a lot

By John  Jan 23, 2008 | 22 out of 23 found this Canon PowerShot A720 IS review helpful

Pros: Great image quality; easy to use; 8 Megapixel; 6X Zoom; Image Stabilization

Cons: Heavy; slow; a little bulky

I don't know a lot about cameras. Until this one I hadn't actually owned one since I was a teen-ager. I have borrowed other peoples in the past few years though. The one that I was the most impressed with was a Canon A510. So, when I felt I n...eeded to get one for an upcoming vacation and went shopping online for cameras, I was especially looking for whatever the A510 had morphed into over the past couple of years. It seemed that the A720 was that camera. One of the things I especially liked on the A510 was that the screen could fold around so that you wouldn't scratch it. The A720 has a larger screen - but it doesn't fold. Like the A510, In addition to taking regular snapshots, it also takes movies and, via 'stitch-assist', will take multi-shot panaramas as well. At the same time I bought the camera I bought a 2GB memory card and rechargable batteries - and a charger - and I recommend all of them for this camera. One of the things I had read is that it goes through batteries fast (and it does) and more pixels per shot means less shots per memory stick. But - a 2GB stick is still huge, even for an 8 Megapixel camera. And the batteries are easy to change. As long as I could recharge one set overnight and have another set in the camera - I was fine. The 6X *optical* zoom is handy - most cameras in this class don't have that. When I actually took it on vacation with me, I felt a little hampered by its weight - it pulls my pocket down. And, after I had taken 150 photos or so, and had deleted a few of them, it began to take longer and longer for it to recover from each shot. I think it could benefit from a de-frag utility for the memory card that doesn't involve a re-format. So - yes - it has some short-comings. But, when I got home and moved the contents of the stick (nice software, by the way, easy to use) to my computer and then printed out some 8.5X11 prints to photo paper on my regular ink jet printer - I was *astonished* how good they look! I presume that the image stabilization feature accounts for how crisp they are - I'm not especially known for steady hands. Plus, using the software that comes with the camera, the 8 megapixel per shot capacity allows me to blow up a portion of the original shot, but still maintain decent resolution. That way I can 'repair' badly composed shots (as it turns out, I take a lot of those...) or even uncover details that I hadn't noticed when I was originally taking the shot. Overall, I'm enormously pleased with my purchase. This camera lets me impersonate a photographer and pull it off - and that's asking a lot from a camera, especially an inexpensive one. Read more Less