Reviews for Canon PowerShot A610 5 Megapixel Compact Camera

what made me actually get this camera is the fact that at imaging-resource.com the low-light tests showed it to be much faster than the f30. I definitely wanted better low-light performance than my s2 coupled with a smaller size and a lighter body (not to mention losing that POS lens cap). It would be nice to have less NR at ISO50 and I think that I got that too...but in anything like that there are tradeoffs, but I think this is a clear winner over the f30 and even the f10 (any Fuji SuperCCD) based on the samples that I looked at (and I looked at a LOT of samples).

So here are my samples.
This is from Times Square, ISO200.

oh, of course they are 5MP shots in superfine mode.

this is the deer shot, ISO400...

a few over the Kent Narrows, ISO50...full 4x zoom, cropped to 640x480, and downsampled 5MP. I tried this at three speeds, 1-250 f7, 1-400 f5 and 1-800 f4, even at 1-400 it was a little shaky (though you'd have to look at the 5MP at 100% to see that). The 1-250 was obviously shaky. This is the penalty that you pay for not having IS, with my s2 I could have easily taken this shot at 12x down to 1-250 (my FZ5 would take it down under 1-200 at 12x). Gonna have to obey the shake warning. I'm adding a 10x zoom from my Olympus sp-500 just to show what this camera can't do (and the sp500 doesn't have IS either).
But you can see from the sp500 shots just how bad the sp500 is crudding up the shot at high zoom (all optical, I never use digital zoom) and the sp500 is actually fairly good under zoom. The s2 would not be any better, though the colors would be a little more accurate than they would be with the s2, the s2 cuts a lot more fine detail out than the sp500 does, plus it has more optical distortion under zoom. The sp500 is a perfectly representable 1-2.5" sensor high-zoom bridge camera. This shot is really crying out for a good DSLR-lens combo. But, to give an idea of what is there, the a610 is doing a good job.

now the sp500 shots, ISO80, 640x480 crops of 6MP superfine 3:2 shots and the full shot downsampled to 640x480

see, this is the big tease...almost all digital cameras will take a photograph that looks ok on the little LCD screen. It even looks ok when you look at it reduced to fit your monitor. Having it look ok even good on your monitor when you look at it at 100%, when you start poking around at the pixel level, that's a different story. Very few digital cameras hold up well when you begin to look at their output "up close and personal". Again, it does not hurt this camera to only have a 4x zoom and 5MP. It reduces the expectations of the owner...to a place where owner and camera can meet in comfort. Just imagine what you would see if it was an A640, with twice the pixels crammed onto the same size sensor and with the same lens. Then you would say, "why did I spend $350 for this?". A very good question. The same thing I ask when I carry my s2 around. Honestly it is overkill for the shots I usually take during the day, and not good enough for the shots I want to take at night. And the sp500 is a lot more comfortable to use and carry, same with my FZ5. This camera, I hope, will give me almost the best of both worlds, small size and good image quality. So far, it seems that way...as long as it is shot fast enough.

Another set of sp500 images of Kent Narrows at 10x zoom, ISO80, for comparison.

By the way the word is going around that the A640 is a better camera than the G7, because the G7 has so much NR as to eliminate all the fine detail even at ISO100. And the pixels on the A640 are half the size of the pixels on the A610, the S-N ratio has to be at least half.

oh, I have to add this, unlike the s2 you cannot adjust a few useful things on this camera. No auto-bracketing, no obvious way to adjust contrast, sharpening or saturation beyond using neutral or vivid or sepia or whatever...it does have the custom timer and AiAf, definitely check the feature list to make sure that you are happy with it. To me the big feature that it is missing is some zoom power, it could seriously use the 6x zoom and IS of the A710.

I do not know what the penalty is in terms of image quality for the A710 though because it gives up the sensor size and pixel size to keep the lens that small (plus the flip LCD, which I really use often). I know the penalty the A700 pays...and I'll find out tomorrow how the a610 shoots over the Inner Harbor. Guarantee some tough test shots from up there. But, so far I like it. I'd love it if it had IS just like it is now. But tomorrow all will be clear. I guess that I will have to take the s2 with me, for comparison.

btw the optical viewfinder is useful only if you are sure the settings and focus-point are ok when the green light comes on. Otherwise you will end up using the LCD anyway, and shooting off the LCD induces camera-shake. That is a big advantage for the mid-range cameras with an EVF, not to mention the ones with IS :) the thing is, the a700 was clearly at a disadvantage in the Inner Harbor compared to the s2 because it just did not get as much light per pixel as the s2, even discounting the lack of IS. Then the lens was a F2.8-F4.8 6x zoom? It was not of much use as the sun went down, and even shooting wide-open I still had to go to ISO200 and 400 while the s2 happily shot ISO50 and 100. On top of that, the A700 image quality was clearly worse than the s2s, even in superfine mode. IS is not going to fix a crappy sensor that needs a ton of NR, that watercolors. And the A710 has even *more* pixels on the same size sensor. Still, that 4x zoom will come up real short at the Inner Harbor, like a 45ACP vs a 30-06. ...without IS on top of that. So I kinda know what to expect, but it has to be done anyway. The s2 will kill it under zoom, but the question is how will they perform wide-angle? I don't see the A610 really hanging with the s2 in terms of absolute imaging performance, but the only relevant question is whether it has good imaging performance within the limits of the 4x zoom. The tradeoff is clear. Size and weight vs optical zoom. Less NR is a bonus. I mean, likewise, I see *absolutely* no point in getting a EOS if it has the same level of NR as the s2. Regardless of the lens advantage. If you want to go out and buy and carry an F2 prime lens, be my guest. There has to be some significant advantage to all that bulk, and it has to come at a reasonable cost. An affordable cost. That makes sense in terms of what else you could be doing with that money...as well, as without all that bulk. A camera has to give performance that is worth its weight in copper or nickel, at least, if not in gold, exactly :)

I have to admit, my sp500 exasperates me to no end, in terms of shooting at 5 or 6MP instead of 2MP which is what my monitor supports. With most high MP cameras you can get some free zoom out of doing that, but this trick simply does not work with the sp500. I see no point in shooting it over my monitor resolution and I only do it in case I want to print the image later. I think in this case it just didn't get a great focus. I hope so, anyway. But the s2 has easily just as much if not more optical distortion, and the fz5, a ton more noise-reduction...though the optics are great the NR is so strong that it strips half the detail out of the shot and the remaining detail is dark and grainy.

Overall pixel-peeping is an almost sure road to frustration. Very few cameras support it well, the only ones I can think of are the G6 and the Nikon 8700, 8800, maybe the P3 in some light. It's hard to get an image that has no visible flaws, it's really a question of how noticeable they are, and how closely you look.

here's a wide-angle ISO50 shot of the little harbor there, so you can see just how far out that house, the boat, the ski-doo ect are that I had to use the sp500 to shoot. And it screwed that up. I'm not happy about this. I would much rather have at least about 20%, 25% of the shot be some recognizable thing worth shooting, to have some small strip in the middle be the sole focus besides the sky and water, that's not good. 35mm is really wide-angle, and some cameras are pushing for 28mm which is good for what? photographing houses from the front yard?

I'd much rather have a shot that has a couple of houses in it, 2, 3, maybe 4, than the entire cove. You can't see anything, really, in such a shot besides "oh look it's a cove with a lot of houses and piers and stuff, but I can't really *see* them, because they're too small". Right next to me on the right was a big house but I was trying very hard not to get it in the shot, I really wanted what was out near the far end of the cove. That's not going to happen with the A610. That is why I like my sp500 but damm if it didn't screw up that shot big-time. I am keeping one of those shots even though it is not a great shot, because it is a great subject.

too much driving in one day :)

the lens zoom motor on this a610 is fairly loud. Has a sort of high pitched whine...not subtle. plus I see that I overexposed those Kent Narrows shots dramatically (never forget that in full sunlight anything white will tend to get washed out at EV0)...I'm not sweating the fine-detail too much with this camera. I think that it should be shot at least EV-0.3, definitely save the whites as you're not going to get much in terms of dark highlights...the noise is not a big problem (even though lots of review sites say the 5MP sensors are noisy, *this* 5MP sensor is not very noisy, at least not in this camera. Maybe they meant the 1-2.5" 5MP sensors not the 1-1.8" 5MP sensors. Who knows.

My outstanding complaint is the limited 4x zoom combined with the lack of IS and admittedly the zoom motor noise is *just* on this side of annoying. You're not going to sneak a shot off on anyone with this camera, if they are in the same room they will hear it. The s2s ultrasonic motor is much quieter and less buzzy. And much faster over a much larger zoom range. But the a610 images are very nice across all ISOs, and the flash system works very well. No real image complaints.

This camera simply kicks butt and takes names.

The exposure is almost always right, which is good because it doesn't have auto-bracketing. It isn't necessary. The shots are always clean and sharp and in focus, with good color balance. Everything works just as it should. It is just about all that you can ask from a camera with two exceptions, it doesn't have IS and it doesn't have SDHD. And it has a moderate zoom. I see the Canon A570 now with the 7MP sensor and IS, probably pushing this camera out of the market. It's a very fast and sensitive camera but it needs IS to really compete in low light, it's not that fast or sensitive that it doesn't need IS when shooting handheld in low light.

Still it's just too good. It is a really really good-shooting camera. I am glad that I didn't go for the 620 or 630 though, because they are just slower with more MP packed on the same size sensor with little additional features. The real buy is the A650 with IS, which I hope will come out soon. I got this off ebay for $185, that's a steal for this level of image quality. But, ultimately, just about what it is worth now, in this market. It's like the ultimate 4-cylinder Nissan sports car. In a world which is now driving 6 and 8cylinder Japanese imports on $2.50 a gallon gas. IS is simply de rigeur. And this camera is getting a little big for the market, too. 4 AAs take up a lot of space and add a lot of weight. I don't see keeping the A6xx and bringing the G7 out and having the RebelXTi too, plus the A7xx with IS and the A5xx with IS. There's too much overlap there, the only differentiation is the swing LCD and the larger sensor.

Get one if you can find one on ebay for a decent price. For $150 it's a steal.

One thing you do have to be careful when shooting the shade towards the sun, as always, to bump up the ev a little, it's not perfect. And it is a *little* noisy at ISO400 and gee it doesn't have an ISO3200 (which is really an overrated ISO1600, which still isn't as fast as this camera at ISO400). But this is like complaining because you came in 2nd at Daytona. It's more than good enough for most shots, only running into trouble when it gets dark, so you have to shoot it "old school". Like this :) Gotta like that swivel LCD, even if it isn't quite as good for this as a swivel lens. Much better image quality than the s4, though. In Manhattan I had more than enough light to shoot it handheld at ISO200, and I shot this at ISO200 from a rest to catch the guy skating. But it will "boink" at ISO400 at 1-10s or so, just too much noise, too light light. I have shot there handheld but just barely. While an A710 with IS can handle, er, "handheld" 1-5th second shots at ISO80 just fine. Plus give you 60% more zoom and 33% more pixels in a smaller and lighter package. I'd wait until they come down in price...funny, they seem to be going up!

the Washington monument shot is ISO50 ev0, the shots of the Japanese screen and the monkeychain are iso400 ev0, 1-25th handheld no flash indoors, the screen was in a room which was quite dark. ISO400 is clean enough to use. No whiteout like the a700, just a little brown speckling here and there. Outside in the daylight it is gorgeous. This camera has no flaws, just a short feature list compared to say the s2 and a710. It begs for IS so that it can be shot at night without concern for handshake.

...though it is critical, if you use ISO400, not to underexpose the shot if you want it to be of any real size. There is a lot of noise at this setting. Underexposing works really well, in terms of extending a cameras shooting range. But if you have to use that trick, be aware of the fact that you are at the very limits of the cameras' performance. You aren't far ahead of the crocodiles' teeth...there's going to be a lot of chroma noise in some of those shots. EV-2.0 at max ISO is the sign of a desperate photographer.

my final "opus"...even if you do have to manually set up the autobracketing each time on the FZ5, this is offset by the fact that it is easier to change the exposure than with the s2. Just the touch of a button does it, with the s2 you have to pull up the function menu then find the exposure entry to change it. There is no dedicated button for this like on the A series Canons. Even so the s2 is pull it out, turn it on, and shoot. The autobracketing is a setup entry, it stays the same through power cycles, and the turn on and lens-extension speeds are much faster than the FZ5. Plus the buttons are better-placed (they fixed this in the FZ7) This gives the s2 a light-footedness and ease of use that is hidden by its size and weight, like Clark Kent hides Superman. Still he needs that phone booth. The S2 is still big and heavy, and its lens cap does have a mind of its own. But...what they both need, really, is a 28-320mm zoom, not a 35-420mm zoom. There simply is hardly any need for a 12x zoom on a 35mm camera, and a lot of times I am walking around with these cameras and simply pining for a 28mm lens. With a 35mm lens, you really can only shoot half, maybe a third, of the normal human FOV. That means that I see a shot, and I have to either walk back another 20yards or more, or I have to not zoom in so that I can get the whole shot. It's easy to have to compromise between getting good detail and getting a large enough FOV. Very easy to overzoom with these cameras, not to mention the 4:3 without a 16:9 or even a 3:2 mode. But, I mean, this is really splitting ant-hairs. Still, if you want a shot and the reason you have a camera is to take shots of scenes that you want to preserve, why would you want a camera that doesn't see things the same way that you do? The camera should at least *start* with around 80% of the normal human FOV then zoom in from there. And frankly I'm tired of shooting 4:3. It just doesn't look natural, there is either too much sky and foreground and the image detail is too small, or there is no FOV. It only works well under high zoom or with a large DOF shot, or, I have to shoot wide and at high res all the time, then crop later. The trend then is to shoot 10MP superfine 35mm all the time just to get the FOV then go in and cut out the sky and foreground and part of the FOV, to make a 16:9 shot at 2MP. No wonder in-camera cropping is such a big deal nowadays. The thing I have to say about the FZ7 and the S3 is that they have more of the features that I want in the FZ5 and S2, but I hate the viewfinder location in the FZ7 (plus it has even more noise and NR than the FZ5) and the S3 just isn't that much better than the s2 that I'd want to buy an S3, plus it has more chroma noise and the ISO speeds are overrated. The problem is that the sensors aren't getting any better, in terms of signal to noise, they're just getting more pixels. But the image quality itself is decreasing. It's like the difference between Britney Spears at 16 with no kids and a first recording contract, and Britney Spears at 25 with two kids and millions in the bank. Neither one is what you want and the second is hardly going to make you happy, even if it has some good features. I want Britney at 30 with no kids and the millions in the bank :)
I want a larger sensor with about the same number of MP and a much better signal to noise ratio but with the same-size body and lens, even if I have to compromise on the long-end of the zoom. Make it 28-200, even. With IS and a sensor with 10x the SNR. And with autobracketing, 16:9 (skip 3:2, who needs it) and a good burst mode. What I want, basically, is an a610 or even G6 with autobracketing, a 28-200mm IS lens and a 16:9 mode. I can take the 4x zoom but I can't take the lack of IS. It's like giving up night sights on a pistol. You can still shoot it at night but it is much harder to get a good shot. Instead Canon gives us the A710 and G7 with 35-200mm lenses and more pixels, the S3 with more pixels, and Panasonic does the same with the FZ7 and FZ8. The problem is that there are only a handful of companies that make the SENSORS. Everyone else is left to differentiate on *features*. I want a better, bigger sensor, better lens and slightly more features than my FZ5 has. Not a worse sensor, smaller, worse lens and a lot more features. I don't want to take pictures with a cameraphone...but that is the way the market is heading. And that is another reason that I am hanging onto the cameras that I have right now. They will get worse, not better. Though I might break down and buy an EOS 350 before it is all said and done. I'm not going to buy a D40 without autobracketing, and I'm not going to buy anything any bigger than it needs to be. The Sony A-DSLR looks interesting because it raises the possibility of buying a bunch of old Minolta lenses without IS but the Canon CMOS sensor is the best. If you go with a D40 or D40x you might as well just use an FZ5 or S2. Sure, it has better high ISO performance, but the camera is 3 times bigger! The D40 is huge compared to even my S2. How are you going to carry a D40 (or any DSLR) around and keep it from being broken or stolen? I can't even imagine that. I'm in the middle of a crowd of people in DC, the other day, holding my s2 in my hands, and a guy tried to snatch it right out of my hands and run off with it. Why? Because it was so big and shiny, he thought that it would be worth some real money even if stolen, and he thought that because it was so big, he could just grab it and run. He actually tried. He walked in front of me from behind, then quickly tried to turn around, grab it and turn back and run. I didn't even realize what he was trying to do until hours later, it never occurred to me that someone would try to snatch it out of my hands in broad daylight on a DC city street, especially not in the part of DC that I was in, with people all around us. In Manhattan, yes; in DC, no, and the same thing happened in Manhattan on 18th street in the Village with a smaller camera, I'm walking down the street holding an A700 in my hand and two guys tried to follow me unawares and snatch it from behind. Yes, these guys are dumb-asses who think they are slick, but they were bold dumb-asses and that is what you would have to deal with all the time, not to mention the idiots who bump into you or your camera or act as if it is a playtoy, and the guys who actually are good thieves. Go buy a big new $600 camera that any moron can sell for $150 in a pawnshop anywhere across the country, that would break in half if you drop it or it gets bumped, and see how long you can carry it around, keep it in one piece and stay sane. You carry it, you're a walking target. Gonna have great high ISO performance, though. Ironic that high ISO performance is most useful in the dark, making it much easier for someone to surprise you and steal it. And if a kid will kill you for your iPod, imagine what they would do for your $600 camera. Especially if they thought that it was worth a lot more, as DSLRs usually are. The problem with a very nice camera is that you can't just freely walk around with it, so you are not likely to have it when you see that shot for which you want to carry it. The bigger and more expensive it is, the less likely you are to have it on you, and the more likely it is to get stolen or broken when you do carry it.
Still it would be nice to have a 350D. Even if I rarely carry it around with me. I would like to have one just for that odd shot of the sunset, night sky, etc that I want to take with a really good camera and lens. On a tripod, etc. I'd never carry it while walking around in the city, but it could stay in my car.

The problem, of course, is that my S2 or FZ5 could take most of the same shots just fine. Not to mention my A710 or A610. I'll leave the sp500 out of this discussion for now. I would have to "rent" a 350D for a couple of weeks just to see the difference. But for now I am happy with my FZ5. The rest are superfluous.

an a610 and a minitripod make for a deadly combination...I have a 4 inch tripod with three legs and with rubber coating on the legs I can actually balance the camera on a post or anything with a knob or ball on top, fairly easily. Last night I shot the hell out of this camera just walking around downtown DC after shooting the cherry blossoms as the sun went down. It certainly does not completey make up for a tripod or high ISO with low noise or IS, but it is not bad at all, especially with the small size, light weight and flip LCD it is hard to beat. It could use an interval timer and continuous autofocus, like the S2, but again the s2 is twice as big and heavy. Still I think that it should get IS somehow. I had some handshake in handheld shots at ISO100 that were 1-50th of a second, then I got some at 1-8th and 1-10th of a second handheld. It simply demands a steady hand or some kind of burst mode. Shooting high ISO is not enough to eliminate camerashake. But first...here's a handheld shot ISO400 1-8th of a sec, vs an ISO50 shot from a tripod. The ISO400 shot is -0.7EV. I am convinced that one should at least *try* to get some of these odd shots, sometimes they do come out ok. Not great but ok, better than no shot at all. But with this camera the key is to just carry a small tripod. Makes for the perfect pair...and what it needs is a tripod adaptor that can be left on the camera. Like a real tripod. And the flip LCD is very important for getting the shots aligned without back contortions. I think this thing moved at least one notch ahead of mh a710...and to think that I didn't even want to take it with me that day, because I knew that I would be out at night and it didn't have IS...it was a surprise and a joy. I hope that you like the shots. It does tend to burn at night unless undershot at least 0.3EV, maybe 0.7EV. Especially when the predominant light is coming from a spotlight. On maybe one shot I took I had to shoot at 0EV to get the lighting right, the rest were all better at a third down, at last.

very very good note all of these are in low sharpening mode. I never shoot with the sharpening at normal, always sharpen to suit afterwards.

This is just a good, clean basic camera with a good feature set. Not as small as it could be, not as fast, not as powerful...but overall a good deal. Good build quality, a rugged layout, good image quality, good color, high sensitivity and adequate resolution. A little barrel distortion in the lens but nothing that can't be removed. I would not have a problem recommending this camera to a beginning to intermediate amateur. If you can get one for under $200 or so, get one. It's worth having even as an extra camera. With IS this camera would be worth $300 easy. As it is, in the market it is in, it will have to sell below $200 to make a good deal. The flip LCD combined with the small package makes it very user-friendly compared to the s2 even if it gives up some features, the zoom and the IS. Now I have run out of things to say to go along with the photos :)

hell, regardless of your level of ability or experience, you can get great shots from this camera over a wide range of conditions. But I'd shoot it in low sharpening mode, superfine resolution.

...the more, the merrier...one of these is handheld iso200, the other is with the camera resting on a seat shooting under a rope, the third is handheld iso400. It throws a lot of punches.

Just buy this camera and choose between taking exactly the shot you want when you want it, or finding a good stand and working from there. You'll find that this is much cheaper, smaller and easier to carry than a DSLR but takes pictures that look, for all intents and purposes, just as good. As long as it is not dark and your subject is not moving. I think it's a self-correcting situation. DSLRs are much more expensive, bigger and heavier. This is intuitively a better deal.

...and yes, I am comparing it to a DSLR. It's that good. And the NikonD40 doesn't support autobracketing either.

Another ISO400 shot and a few other random shots, I've probably repeated them already. By the way, these are not just downsampled, they are also saved at a lower Q value to save space. I generated these in Matlab from the original jpegs. You don't think I'd make all these crops by hand, do you? LOL no, no one I know would want to see image files these small, at 640x480. These are just low-Q samples of 5MP superfine shots. Trust me, this camera is the real deal.

hm, maybe I'll repost these images at a higher Q value, I wouldn't want to understate the image quality of this camera and there are some obvious compression artefacts in the shots that I've put up here, recently. Quick note, these are downsampled directly from 5MP shots, ISO50 handheld. Again I see that with this camera I cannot shoot handheld under 1-15s with any reliability, but with my a710 I can get clean, stable shots at 1.3sec handheld. Yes handheld. This means that I can (and have) taken clean stable handheld shots at ISO80 with my a710 that I struggled to get at ISO200 with my a610. At ISO 400 the a710 is actually faster than the a610 at ISO200, and it has less noise at ISO800 than the a610 has at ISO400. I find that with the a710 it is more a question of my patience than the cameras' ability to get a good shot under the specific lighting conditions. I can shoot all around the clock with it, given anything resembling respectable light. The big difference is that the a610 is a little more photogenic than the a710, which tends to have a little noise and grain even at ISO80. And as such the a610 demands a tripod even at dusk (unless you want to shoot ISO200). But anyway look at some more photos. Daytime wide-angle ISO50, in the afternoon sun.

..it is a shame that I cannot just post a larger shot. Here's a couple of 640x480 crops at 100% from an ISO100 and an ISO200 shot, so you can see the grain and noise that this camera picks up with increasing ISO. These are shot in low-sharpening mode. The shot looks simply goregous, fullscreen. But I had to crank up the ISO to get a stable shot at EV0 and a price was paid. Generally I look at the shots at 100% to see which ones are really stable, and the increase in noise at ISO200 stood out, also the loss of detail.
But still the shots are full of detail and very clean, overall. Only at IS0400 in the background, can you see noise with this camera at full-screen. But this camera simply makes gorgeous shots. It really doesn't need more than "low sharpening", the shots are already highly detailed and sharp even in low-sharpening mode. It is noticeably sharper and better-detailed than my a710...as long as it is shot fast enough to get a stable shot. Its one quirk is that, in general, you just don't know if that is the case short of using a tripod. With IS you know that you will get some good shots if you take enough precautions, even handheld, no matter how slow you shoot.

more ISO50 shots...I downsampled these and the others that I posted in the past few days, by hand with Paint in WinXP. You can see the difference between doing it that way (with an image viewer slash editor program and saving the jpegs with a high Q rating) and using Matlab and saving the files with a Q rating of 68. I apologize for that. Hopefully posting even more shots will make up for it :) I'll run off a string of 640x480 shots with a 90 Q and go from there, doing it by hand takes much too long.

The thing is, a 1MP shot at a Q of 70 is not much bigger in terms of file size than a 640x480 shot with a Q of 85+ but you get so much more image detail with the extra pixels. But it's not my system. Anyway I've said all that I need to say...I just want to post some of the good shots from this camera. Talk is cheap, but you just can't see what this camera can do, with a 640x480 shot. You can see that it is better than a cell phone, but not much more than that. Any 5MP shot downsampled that much will look ok, as long as it is reasonably well exposed, stable, and in focus. You can't really evaluate a camera properly by shooting it at 640x480 or even at 1 or 2MP. The devil is in the details, or lack thereof. If I was only going to shoot at 1MP I would be happy with a TZ1, if I did not mind fixing the exposure on half the shots. By contrast, I just don't need a 10MP camera.

These I am downsizing by hand for maximum image quality...I apologize for the crappy jpegs at Q-68 that I posted here, earlier. But I can't delete them. I wish that I could just drag and drop a bunch in here...but they would just be more of the same. Take my word for it. This camera takes very good-looking photos. As long as you have enough light to get enough speed, or a tripod. If you like to take shots, want them to look great and tend to take too many photos, if, like me, you have a hard drive full of the same shot taken 40 times at slightly different exposures, viewpoints, and ISOs, this would be a good camera for you. When it gets dark and you didn't feel like bringing your mini-tripod, just put it away and do something else. Sort your photos, for example. Last night I took 150 photos with my a710 after it got dark. Handheld. Sooner or later I have to look at them all, at 100%, and see which ones are even reasonably stable. That's prior to sorting them for image quality, or, ok, sorting for image quality first then sorting for stability. In any case having IS means that you can take a sh-tload of photos under all sorts of conditions...quite often, *too* many photos. You simply will not be able to do that with this camera, and the ones that are good and stable, will look great if you get the exposure right. You worry about the scene and the hold, and maybe, conservatively shoot at -0.7EV...the a710 will take care of the rest.

Sorry, the a610 ;) see, I wasn't even paying attention to the camera. Now I have to post more shots :)

By the way I am consciously doing this today and not going out shooting at a very interesting place that I found yesterday, worked out even better than I hoped. Saving that for tomorrow...with my worst camera...on purpose. I just have way too many shots on this little bitty hard drive, and I got it to keep my photos on instead of spreading them out over 4 3.5" drives. I have created over 35,000 photos over the past two years, including crops and downsizes. And if I shot at 1MP all the time I could easily hit 100k on this 40GB drive. 2MP I could do, since I never print my shots.

...if I did that, I wouldn't even know what to do with all the shots that I have. It would take 27 hours to display 100k photos at 1 photo per second. So I am consciously taking my *bad* cameras so that I don't take so many good photos, and hoping that between that and not buying any more cameras, since I think that between the a610 and a710, an fz5, an s2 and an sp500, I am happy with what I have, I will begin to weed out some of the old crap and not make so much new crap. And I have a lot of crap on my drive. It just goes to show that you can take good photos even with a bad camera, if you are patient, persistent, somewhat competent and have a reasonable eye for a good shot. And you just like to walk around and shoot pictures :) Add high-speed cards, burst-mode, autobracketing, IS and good optics and image processing to the mix, and you have a real disaster :)

Still, where would the Internet be today without porn, and too much of it is child porn. How many Americans would fly to Asia if they couldn't have sex with little kids, there. What would this world be like, really, if we were not so visually-oriented, if we did not like to travel, and to acquire things? If we were all monks, or maybe, Amish? Well, the day may come when we have no choice but to sit at home and look at our photos of our past adventures. When that day comes, I will be beyond ready for it :) I can only say, look for one of these on ebay and buy one. I got mine for $185, it's a steal, from Cameta Camera, and they gave me a refurbished unit at the last minute before closing, I never got to look at it closely. I just found out, 3 months later, that mine is not only scratched on the barrel, it also has a small scratch on the lens. Nothing that affects the images though. And I have to look real close, at just the right angle, to see the scratch on the lens. Hey, you want one without scratches, buy factory direct and hope that it is not scratched. My a710 has a thin piece of string or a hair, inside the lens barrel, I can see it clearly, it was in a sealed box from Circuit City. The darker ones are probably ISO200, the lighter ones ISO50.

then it didn't post the photos I attached to the reply.
525 photos of the Smithsonian, during daytime...I'm telling ya, don't test the lower limits of stability with burst shooting unless you are ready to deal with a lot of quasi-stable photos.

I just got back from Moscow...I took my a710 and my a610. Agonized over this long and hard and out of 5 cameras, my sp500, s2, fz5, and these two, I decided to take these two, the a710 for all the reasons that I bought it even after owning the other four, and the a610 just as a backup in case something happened to the a710. I didn't want to be stuck there without a decent camera after going trough all this crap to find a good one to take on trips. All I can say is that I am glad that I did take the a610 because it simply blew away the a710 in Moscow. After this description I will just post photos (I am just starting to go through my photos) but this is what I noticed. The a610s images were much cleaner and sharper side to side and corner to corner, they were simply "consistent" where the a710 was really only sharp over a centered square about half the shot. The a610 colors were much more realistic, it had better tolerance for overexposure, better contrast and saturation tuning, much lower purple fringing, much more accurate exposure metering, and much less "chalkiness" as a combination of all the above. Then on top of that, it was much easier to shoot above or below eye level due to the flip lcd, the batteries lasted longer and the night shooting was ok at ISO200 and 400with low exposure values and of course from a rest. It simply was the better camera. What would have been better is if it had autobracketing. I didn't even really need IS. I was getting good shots shooting handheld down to 1-20th sec ev-1.7 or ev -1.3 at night, just fine. That meant that just about any decently lit scene, with streetlights or something, I could shoot handheld with the a610 and get good results. Of course in such situations I used the custom timer with a 1 second delay and a 2 or 3 shot count. I almost never used the zoom, almost everything I shot at 35mmm, and the 6x was just not required for shooting panoramic landscape shots or shots of churches and so forth that were close up. What would have been more useful would have been a wider lens, but I just dealt with the 35mm lowend. After two days I did not want to shoot the a710 any more, I just shot it one more day, just to be stubborn. But for sure I saved the best shots for the a610, or, was it, the a610 for the best shots. Then I came back home, shot the Georgetown Harbor with the a610 and noticed sure enough that it even beat my s2 for many of the same reasons, notably chalkiness. There is just something about these small sensors that makes Canon set them up for a very very steep tone curve, and it is easy for them to flare out and chalk up in extreme light or dark conditions. They are very sensitive to exposure and contrast settings. The a610 simply doesn't have this problem. It is much easier to shoot, much easier to get good shots even if the exposure is not right-on. The a710 demands that you are within a step of the correct exposure, and just does not tolerate overexposure. It is, without a doubt, an "ok" camera, and you can, without a doubt, get decent shots with it, especially if you don't look at them too closely, but they will not match the quality of what comes out of the a610. Period. Simply looking at the corners and sides, off-center, is proof of that. That loss of sharpness alone negates much of the IS "advantage", for it happens all the time, with every shot, regardless of what speed you shoot at. Plus. PLUS. The a610 never blew a focus. The a710 blew focus a handful of times over 500 shots over two days. It really requires a patient focus and shoot procedure, you must half-push, wait, and then fire with it. Rushing is a recipe for disaster. Now, last but not least, I would say that the a710 was still a little easier to get good shots with at night (and it definitely focuses well in darker light than my fz5 can even get a focus in). But the noise was about the same, ISO400 with both cameras. You just can't raise the exposure up too much at ISO400 because the noise will show up even more. And I got some 1-60s ISO400 shots at ev-1.3 or so with the a610. It was plenty fast enough for handheld night shooting. Sure I had to weed through some bad shots but still I got the shots that I wanted. Generally the process was ISO200 ev-1.7 and -1.3 then ISO400 ev-1.3 and -1.7. And I just kept the best one. And if I couldn't get at least a 1-15th sec shot then I found a rest. And I almost always got at least a 1-15th sec shot. No doubt the a710 can shoot shots handheld that are too dark for the a610, handheld. The question is, do you really want to take these shots in the first place. Shooting by moonlight, the a710 is definitely a great camera. Shooting by sunlight the a610 simply spanks it. By streetlight they are about the same. After this I am basically ready to sell my a710 and buy a backup a610 before they disappear or all the good ones are gone. I really doubt that I will get a decent value for my a710, but at the very least I'm not worried about buying another one if I lose or break this one. But its strength is, really, night shooting, even more than the FZ5. Which really looks great side-to-side, by comparison. Honestly, the first set of shots that I took with the a710 in Moscow simply looked like crap, they were way overexposed, the next set came out with overexposure and purple-fringing mixed together, just a mess, and I spent a day shooting a railroad station north of Prospekt Mira from an apartment building just to tune the exposure and decipher the results from each camera. No doubt the a610 is a better camera. It is photographic and at ISO50-200, almost flawless. The a710 will give you an image with numerous flaws that you can see without effort, they merely require you to know what you are looking at to recognize them. Yet, still, if you look at them full-screen, you can kinda say they are ok. Lay the shots from the a610 and a710 side by side and it is no contest.

One other thing I should mention was that the sp500 was an easy choice to not take because I didn't have time to get another XD card, but in hindsight it would not have been bad because it can do 5-step autobracketing and it turned out that the autobracketing was much more important than the zoom or IS. I shot a ton of shots just changing the exposure. It is hard to shoot city streets on a cloudy day or a sunny day and get the right exposure, you can't just set it at 0EV and get good shots. Generally 0EV is either too high or too low, depending on where the sun is. But I had two reasons to not take the s2, the lens cap and the fact that it was the biggest camera that I had, so it would be easiest to snatch off my hip in a crowded Moscow subway or city street. That made the two smaller ones an easy choice. It also meant my having to manually change the exposure a lot. I think the s2 would have made life a lot easier, but the sp500 would have required a large card to keep up...with XD you'd have to trade speed with an H card for size with an M card. Taking a 5-shot autobracket at 6MP eats up a ton of space. The H cards at 1GB are really too small (that is easy to fill up in a day) and the M cards at 2GB are kinda pushing the lower limits of speed (too slow and the camera stalls and dump shots because it hasn't flushed the buffer). The s2 is delightfully easy to shoot with autobracketing, it's sole problem being that it is a pain to change the default exposure. Anyway here is some more stuff that you don't want to see, the a610 isn't looking all that great here but it is clearly giving a cleaner shot than the a710 is giving. And at fullscreen it looks much better, cleaner and less chalky.

ok the "money shots". I saved the a610 for these and then guess what? When I got there to take them, my batteries began to give up the ghost. Yes, I had forgotten spares. My last day in Moscow, my last chance to take these, it's almost dark and my 4 NiMH batteries finally begin to die. I flipped and flipped and turned off the LCD and shot with the viewfinder and somehow got these shots. I have gotten a lot of great shots with the a610. I would happily recommend it to anyone who wants to take great-looking photos with a very low-priced, small-sized camera. Get one off of ebay, you will be very happy with it unless you want it to fit in your shirt pocket or you want to shoot 1 or 2MP action shots at night.

...that plus I threw them both into my laptop bag, easily. Each of the other three would have required a ride in my suitcase, asking to be filched by a baggage handler. Or I would have had to carry them on board, and risk losing them in my sleep or just by sheer accident. Given that the shots from the a610 look better than even the s2 shots and it is half the size and weight plus it has a flaky lens cap, I see no reason to take the s2 on a trip. I can think of one situation out of the 5 days that I was there, when I really wanted more than a 4x zoom. Even then it was hardly necessary. The main thing is that I see no reason at all why I would leave the a610 behind and take the a710. The a610, even without IS, is so much better in so many ways, with so many useful, almost essential features that the a710 just doesn't have. It is not just older, but better, too. It takes better photos and it is better-suited to be used to take them and to travel.

I leave with one question...is there a way to quantitatively measure "camera shake" and show its influence on image quality?

*some* camera shake is acceptable. First it is better than not getting the shot at all, second it is better than getting a noisy or over-NR'd shot, and third it is fine if you are showing the image on a computer monitor, just casually. It takes a fair bit of shake to ruin a shot. Some is noticable, yes. But when shooting at night, there's a loss of detail anyway. That last shot that I put up looked ok if a little soft at full screen and only when I looked at the fence posts at 100% could I tell that it was really kinda shaky. Ordinarily I would throw that degree of shake away...it certainly would go if I had better shots...but in this case all I have that is even close is an ISO400 shot at 1-30sec, EV-1.7. And frankly the slower, shakier ISO200 shot looks better. At full screen. Because there is a lot less luminance noise and less detail lost to NR. Again this camera with a little shake is not noticably worse than the a710 with more noise, more optical distortion, a steeper response curve, and more NR, even with IS. IS on the a710 is like putting makeup on a pig. Then, because I shot this as part of a 2-shot burst with a 1-second delay, I found a second 1-15s ISO200 shot which is slightly less shaky...it looks just fine, full-screen.
Can you tell the difference at 640x480? Here is the IS0400 shot at 1-30sec for comparison. At 100% it looks the same in terms of shakiness, but with a lot more noise. You can get good, clean slow handheld shots with this camera, it just takes some good technique. It is definitely easier with the a710 but you will pay the price with extra NR and lower lens sharpness. On the other hand, you can take shots with the a710 handheld that smiply cannot be taken with the a610 handheld. You have to choose between dating Rosanne Barr on a regular basis, and wanting to date Gisele Bundchen and occasionally getting to actually go out with her. I'd prefer to take 10 shots and get one or two good ones that I'd want to keep and maybe even print, than to take 5 shots and get one or two "ok" ones. Of course, even *that* depends on the shots that you are taking. The a710 will take an "ok" shot under an extremely wide variety of shooting conditions. Under *most* of those conditions, the a610 will take a *good* shot. The a710 is not a whole lot better than a good cell-phone camera. The extra resolution just highlights the average lens sharpness and average sensor performance. On the other hand it is definitely better than the Nikon s4, s10 and the Panasonic TZ1.

the thing is, with any camera you will have to accept some minuses to go with the pluses. With the a610 one thing that you do not have to accept is low or even medium image quality. It takes really great-looking photos. It has a LOT of pluses and very few minuses, really the only one is the lack of IS. It is a challenge to shoot this camera handheld in low light. Not an insurmountable challenge...and you can always take a small tripod.

That is the only reason that I would shoot the a710 instead of this camera, and frankly, I'd rather shoot my FZ5 unless it is almost pitch-black. No doubt the a710 has a lower light threshold. I would say that to beat it, at night, handheld, you need a DSLR. Or an a610, fz5, s2 even an sp500, and a tripod. The sp500 is not going to focus well in the dark and the s2 is not really all that great-focusing either, in low light. No question the a710 is very versatile in terms of the light in which it can be shot well.

ok just as an aside, I've done some further checking and I see that my Canon a610 is at least -0.3 maybe -0.7EV down compared to my A710. That may account for a speed difference, it definitely gives the a610 a little more breathing room when it comes to overexposure and purple fringing. It still has a sharper lens and less NR in the first place.

Reply by member: zoglog
May 11, 2007

Thanks for all your impressions on this camera, I've been considering a camera for my parents. I sure wish I had the time to travel around like you, me jealous :).

well, I was so impressed with the A610 that I decided to buy another one as a spare, in case I break this one and it gets to be really hard to find good A610s on eBay. But then I thought about it and thought that maybe I would try an A620. There will be substantial overlap but the A620 has significantly better image resolution than the A610. It's a little slower, in exchange for that, but the A610 isn't fast enough to shoot handheld in the dark, anyway. Plus the 7MP sensor in the A620 is supposed to be cleaner than the 5MP sensor in the A610. Still, either one will make a great companion to my Panasonic FZ5. And if this all works out I will definitely have a few extra cameras. Instead of just one or two extra cameras.

For those still debating whether to buy this camera or not, here's a comparison between it and a Canon A710 in Moscow. A 640x480 crop from the same street scene with the street scene following. The street scene shot is from the A710. ISO 50 for the A610, ISO 80 for the A710, both in full-res superfine mode.

Next a shot that I took tonight, 1-4sec ISO 200 and 400, along with a 1-4sec ISO200 S2 shot. Now, to be serious, I took these with the A610 just for fun, I figured there was no way they would come out decent, without IS...that's why I took it with the s2, too. But see for yourself. They are a tad bit shaky but not bad at all. These looked better than a lot of the S2 shots. Of course I put the A610 away after this and shot the s2 exclusively, along with some other shots from my A710. They will both shoot down into the 1 second range hand-held, with IS on continuous. But it is not like you are going to get a lot of great handheld shots at those speeds. And if I can steal a 1-4s handheld shot, even if I have to go to -1.7EV to get it? I'm good. Especially since the A610 focuses more reliably than the A710 and has a lot less NR and a lot less noise too. And shoots twice as fast at the same ISO rating. I think the ISO is a little overrated on this camera. Or something. Anyway it's very fast. That's why I got it. It also happens to take very good photos. This camera is really hard to beat for the price and size. I did not expect for it to be this good. It is better than I had hoped for. If you need more MP, try the A620...it's slower, but it definitely has more resolution. You trade one for the other. Again, I am sure that it is better to have a lower ISO and a little camera shake than to have a "steady shot" at a higher ISO. Especially at lower EV. The noise blurs the image more than the shake. The best thing to do is to find a rest and shoot at ISO50. I would never try to beat that shooting handheld. At least, not again.

The ISO is underrated on it or the EV scale is not right. Or both. It is clearly darker at 0EV than my other cameras. That has the consequence of giving it more highlight headroom at EV0. I think that it is set up perfectly. It does raise the very good question of how many MP do I need, and at what cost. Because this is a damm-good 5MP 4x zoom camera, I think that you can't do better without going for a D40 or RebelXT with a 38-154 F2.8/4.0 lens. With IS, even. But that camera would be 4x the size of this one and the D40 image resolution would not be any higher. It would take an XT at least to beat it. And you just have to ask. Is it really worth carrying around a DSLR, to get better pictures? Is it worth getting a slower camera, to get a little more image detail in daylight shooting? Even if you don't already own an A610? I don't know...all I know is that I took this shot at 1-30s ISO50 handheld, standing on a rock in the middle of a stream...it came out a little blurry, so I ran it through a mild edge filter and downsized it and posted it for you to see. After a year and a half of searching...I think that I'm done for a while. All I really want is one of these with autobracketing. I'll try an XT or XTi sometime later in the year. Maybe for Christmas I'll get myself one. Maybe. I still have to carry it. But, it's true. All I need it to do is shoot at ISO100 as well as my A610 shoots at ISO50, and so on. But I could say that about an A620 too. It's the noise. Without low noise, high ISO is useless for anything but action shots. It requires too much NR, and that just ruins the shot. The only way to get around the noise problem, compared to this camera, is to get a DSLR. There is no other way. NR software just kills the fine detail even more. You need a better, faster, cleaner sensor to beat this camera. Not more MP and a tripod. You will be a slave to that tripod. If you want more MP, you will have to get a DSLR to beat the A610 and get more MP, too. Even if you just want less NR, you are looking at a DSLR.

A week later, I'm still of the same opinion. Plus I realized something else. With the A610 shooting during the day it has more speed than I need to take the shot without handshake at ISO50...certainly enough for me to take full-zoom shots without worrying. But there's one other thing. Having that speed also freezes any moving objects, like, cars that would be whizzing by, otherwise. Even birds. While shooting at ISO50. And it raises the F# beyond 1-1250, increasing depth of field, making the multipoint focus more effective. I think the A620 may have more fine detail due to the higher MP but I would trade away the speed advantage of the A610 and there still probably would be unnecessarily too much NR in the camera. Yes, the only way to know for sure would be to get it and find out...but I know that I would pay a speed price when it gets near dark. Instead of a 1-80 shot ISO50 I'd have to take a 1-80 shot ISO100 or 1-40 shot ISO50. Or cut the EV. I'd cut the EV anyway when it gets dark, as the camera naturally tends to overexpose as it gets dark. I mean...the big thing is how much is that extra MP and extra resolution going to cost me, besides the $200 for the camera? I've looked at it closely, it would be like going from 3000LPI to 4000LPI. The A620 is noticeably sharper than the A610. But at half the speed. I would expect to get more camera shake, more often, when shooting handheld at or near dusk, in exchange for more resolution during the day and when shooting from a rest. A Rebel XTi would solve both problems, at the cost of a bigger, much more expensive camera. I guess it's like coaching an NFL team. Do you stick with the experienced veteran and his wobbly legs and aching back, or go with the first round draft pick who has 3 starts under his belt? I think this would be a much easier question to answer if I had to print 20"x16" images at 1200DPI. At 8x12, 1200DPI, it's a non-issue. 5MP is more than enough. This camera is a killer value for $200. All you need to do is decide if it is going to keep you from getting that DSLR. You should at least buy one "for your kids".

Indeed I find myself at the end of a two-year road. The A610 is not the perfect answer when it comes to resolution, or low noise-reduction shooting. But it does have very good resolution, decently low NR, and it is definitely fast. How to beat it in a camera of this size? Not to mention price range? I don't think that is possible short of going to a camera with IS. But any camera with IS is going to cost you shooting speed and increased NR. There are no 5MP 1-1.8" CCD sensor cameras on the market that have IS. You're looking at at least 7MP. The problem is that cameras are devolving...they are trading sensitivity away for resolution. Every new generation of camera on the market is less sensitive and shoots slower than the previous generation. IS is allowing the shooter to shoot at low ISO at lower and lower speeds...but it is compromising high-speed daylight performance. IS cannot make objects stop moving, it can't reduce sensor noise. Today I spent a good few hours looking at DSLRs, seriously looking...there is not one on the market that shoots faster than the Canon A610. Not even the D40. For one it is a 3:2 camera. All of the 8 and 10MP DSLRs are slower. If you buy one of them, you might as well buy an A620 or A630, for all the speed that they will give you. They will give you less *noise* but no more *speed*. Allowing you to shoot at ISO1600, at speeds that are barely faster than the A610 at ISO400. Certainly not enough to make up for the extra bulk and the image distortion that comes from shooting at such ISOs. Plus the D40 and D40x don't have autobracketing so basically they are just overgrown A620s, ok, maybe A640s. Let's say A630s and split the difference.

You might as well just buy one of the two, unless you need the ability to switch lenses (sure, get an IS lens) or shoot RAW (but...why would you need to shoot RAW with all those in-camera adjustments, unless you want to absolutely eliminate any and all NR and in-camera sharpening, or you're desperate to extract every stop of dynamic range that you can get from the scene?). There's no advantage in buying a DLSR otherwise. And there is an obvious size, weight and complexity issue associated with them. Not to mention the cost. To me, the fact is, I would never carry one of those things, especially not compared to a camera this small, that really does fit into my pocket in a pinch, and easily into a hip bag. Plus there is not one DLSR on the market with a swivel LCD. This is it, folks. Short of buying that Rebel XTi. I'm done. Simply out of plausible options. Maybe I will actually get an A620 one day, as a backup, and for the occasional daylight shot where I just don't need all this speed, if I can get one for around $150 on eBay. Or maybe I'll just get another A610 as a backup. But otherwise. Why try to do what can't be done? The Canon A610 really cannot be beat for an all-around general-purpose travel camera. Everything else is much bigger, much slower, much more expensive, and or can't match it in terms of image quality.

well, right after I wrote that, I thought about the question of how reliable are the tests. I've already seen that the sample shots that are on dpreview are not necessarily representative of the camera in real-world tests...ie in my hands...and I realized the difference betweeen a 4:3 and a 3:2 camera and the test config can dramatically affect the shooting speed. So I grabbed my s2 and my a610 which supposedy should represent the extremes of my cameras, maybe the a710 but still, the s2 is definitely slow enough...and I shot them somewhat carefully in the room that I was sitting in, wide-angle, trying to take the same shot, and of course varying the ISO. And the s2 was maybe 20% slower than the a610, not *HALF* the speed as all the "tests" have "shown". Like, 1-50 instead of 1-60, 1-100 instead of 1-125...1-30 instead of 1-40. I could have easily chalked this up to a difference in lens transmission. I said "screw it" and ordered an A620 (from a place where I could return it) and decided to do this test for myself. Again, I'm doing everything that I can do to avoid buying a DSLR if for no other reason than I will never carry it especially with the A610 in my pocket. I might want a little more resolution, and the A620 is definitely a higher-resolution camera than the A610. I might not want to lose too much speed, and I will see just how much slower it is. As far as the NR goes I'm not going to have any less of it while shooting my current crop of cameras. And the A620 can't have too much more NR and still have significantly more detail, too. Time to buy and see.

well, right after I wrote that, I thought about the question of how reliable are the tests. I've already seen that the sample shots that are on dpreview are not necessarily representative of the camera in real-world tests...ie in my hands...and I realized the difference betweeen a 4:3 and a 3:2 camera and the test config can dramatically affect the shooting speed. So I grabbed my s2 and my a610 which supposedy should represent the extremes of my cameras, maybe the a710 but still, the s2 is definitely slow enough...and I shot them somewhat carefully in the room that I was sitting in, wide-angle, trying to take the same shot, and of course varying the ISO. And the s2 was maybe 20% slower than the a610, not *HALF* the speed as all the "tests" have "shown". Like, 1-50 instead of 1-60, 1-100 instead of 1-125...1-30 instead of 1-40. I could have easily chalked this up to a difference in lens transmission. I said "screw it" and ordered an A620 (from a place where I could return it) and decided to do this test for myself. Again, I'm doing everything that I can do to avoid buying a DSLR if for no other reason than I will never carry it especially with the A610 in my pocket. I might want a little more resolution, and the A620 is definitely a higher-resolution camera than the A610. I might not want to lose too much speed, and I will see just how much slower it is. As far as the NR goes I'm not going to have any less of it while shooting my current crop of cameras. And the A620 can't have too much more NR and still have significantly more detail, too. Time to buy and see.

...again, same shot, same ISO same EV lowest EV no zoom, both my Canon A610 and A710, a different crop, though. Sharpness down on both. The takeaway is that if you did not have a better camera around, you would be happy with the A710 shots, looking at them full screen, and definitely happy with it in low light. If you were lucky and slightly underexposed the shot, you'd be even happier. One thing I learned, don't shoot in low light at EV0. Adjust the EV to give a "realistic exposure lighting" to the shot, regardless of the camera. Unless you want the camera to brighten it for you. Anyway as long as you don't look at the A710 shots at 100%, as long as you are careful not to overexpose, it's fine. It's still not as bad as the S4 and TZ1, not by a long shot. But the A610 is better, noticably, clearly better, when shooting during the day, or if you can find a rest. And that's with a 25% disadvantage in resolution. This is why I went ahead and bought the A620 as a "spare" for my A610. I mean, they each are $200 refurbished, how can you pass this up?

And trust me, it's better to buy $200 cameras that you are happy with, within their limitations, than to buy $300 or $400 cameras that you are not happy with except in limited shooting conditions. Not to mention $600 or $800 cameras that you will never want to carry and shoot because they are so big and bulky, and will need $200-$500 lenses to get good shots out of. My s2, for example, is a great wide-angle camera. But why would I want all that bulk and weight to take wide-angle shots that I can shoot perfectly well with an A610 or even a Fuji A345? The s2 is a better camera...for the shots that I don't shoot all that often, in very low light, handheld, or at high zoom. I hope that you choose well, for yourself.

er, #43 is lowest ISO, no zoom. Pardon :)

"why a little shake is better than a lot of noise", take 20. This is an ISO200 shot -1.3EV handheld. I could have rested the camera right on the stairrail right in front of me and shot it at ISO100 or 50...but that would have meant shooting it at half or a quarter of the speed. The cars would have obliterated the shot. This would be a nice shot for a DSLR but I wouldn't advise carrying one down the Tverskaya at 2am on a warm Saturday night. Unless you have a GPS card in it, or something. Anyway this was good practice for shooting at low EV using the custom timer. And I just have to credit Canons' approach, here. I would absolutely reserve ISO400 for -2 or -1.7EV only, but that will result in a fairly detailed shot with very little noise, relatively. At ISO200 at night, you hardly notice the loss of fine detail and extra noise over ISO50 or 100. And if you shoot slow enough, you can get a nice, "steady" shot with good lighting and almost no visible noise. Easily better than a faster shot with more noise but no significant improvement in stability. Well, there were good rests all over the place...in front of the Kremlin there are all these little lights that are excellent for my mini-tripod...but I left the mini-tripod back home. So I have some excellent shots of 7/8ths of the Kremlin at ISO50, and some decent handheld shots of the whole Kremlin at ISO200. There was no need to resort to the A710 in this light, and I would not want to shoot it from a mini-tripod, anyway. Not only does it not have the flip LCD but the tripod mount is way off on the right side of the base. A real pain in the butt to use with a minitripod.
If I have not said it already I will say it again: this camera is a steal at $250 or less. A solid 5-star rating. The one funky thing that I've seen with it is that if you catch a light at the wrong place on the sensor, the whole sensor breaks out with this streak of light, like a very fine grid. It happens once in a while and seems to be a quirk. A slight tilt of the camera makes it go away.

...got my hands on an A640 today. I have to say, it's the same camera just with more pixels. Images look almost exactly the same, ISO400 is a little cleaner on the A640, and it is only slightly slower. 1-100s vs 1-125s, for example. Of course you get a major magnification benefit from the A640 (plus the ability to shoot from a PC, and ISO800, and SDHD)...but other than that I really couldn't see any difference, even at 100%. The files were 75% bigger at the same image-quality setting and it was black instead of silver. The motor whine was the same, but I had to open the battery door to get the SD card out. And I don't see any reason to get it and not the A630 or A620. With the A630 you get SDHD and ISO800 too, but the A620 is cheaper and the images are about the same size.

one parting note and I'm walking away from this...
if you have any doubt about whether the shooting speed is fast enough, or whether the EV is too high, lower the EV, switch to a 1 second time-delay with a 2-shot burst, then raise the ISO. The EV is almost always too high unless you're in strong shadow, I pity the fool who naively points his or her camera and takes a shot at EV0. There's no guarantee that raising the ISO will give you a stable shot, and you will definitely incur a noise penalty that is effectively the same as mild camerashake. And what if you get both? Other than that, this camera is as capable of getting the shot as you are capable of framing it and holding the camera steady. But if worse comes to worst and you get a noisy, shaky shot? If you can't sit back 6 feet from it and be happy with it? Just throw it away. It'll drive you nuts. The thing that this camera will do for you is it will allow you to throw away shots because *you* screwed up the shot, not the camera, all for a price that you can easily afford, at a size that you can easily carry, with an LCD that will allow you to easily frame your shot and shoot it from almost any angle, with a feature set that enables you to take good shots in borderline or poor light. It really is almost too simple, easy, and good, to own. You just run out of good reasons to buy a better camera :) you can still make an argument for more zoom, as it will hardly replace a 12x midbody in that way, but you just have to ask: how many times do I really need more than 4x? It's not an insignificant difference. And really my Panasonic DMC-FZ5 is the only camera that I would prefer to carry than this one, for that reason. That plus it has IS so I can handhold in less light than the A610, definitely, but it is not so much bigger that it is a pain to carry. I'd have to say that *all-around* the FZ5 is a more complete camera. But there's no question that the A610 is almost as good all-around, and much smaller and easier to shoot from a mini-tripod, and that it has better image quality than the FZ5. No question about it. It just doesn't have the zoom or the auto-bracketing. There is no question that 12x is useful. None at all. But only on rare occasions. I would say that about 15% of all the shots that I've ever taken have been over 4x zoom, tending towards 12x as the subject distance increased, But you can only shoot at high zoom with good light or a tripod, even if your camera has IS. So you either carry the A610-A640 and live with 4x, or you carry a bigger camera and live with the size. You are not going to find a camera this size for $200 or so, with this level of image quality, outside of the A6xx-series Canon range. Trust me. I looked for two years. I had the A700, I have an A710, they are not nearly as good as the A610 in terms of image quality. The lens sucks and the sensor sucks and the camera image is distorted and full of NR artifacts. At least...compared to the A610. It is like going to Christmas dinner at your sisters, or your mothers. Your sister is probably a decent cook. But she probably learned from her mother. The A710 learned everything that it knows from the A610. And you will not find a better point and shoot than a Canon, at least, not in 2007. One day they will age out this review, one day you will not be able to buy an A6xx series Canon, and then, that day, all those other crappy cameras will become "decent" again. Until then they all suck. I would have sold my FZ5 a long time ago if it didn't have such a great lens, and my s2 and SP500 are on the way to eBay. I might keep my A710 just for the feature set, its all-around usefulness and small size, but I would never choose to shoot it over my A610 during the day. I guess that I've said that 5000 times. I've taken a lot of great shots with my s2. But I just don't see carrying it anymore. It's just a beast and the lens sucks under zoom. It really is just an average to decent all-around camera with a 12x zoom, not really good at anything other than being that decent all-around camera with a 12x zoom. And you either carry it, or you get better cameras and carry them. I've got at least two that are better, and smaller and lighter and faster and their lens caps actually stay on. I mean, if I'm going to keep the s2, I might as well get a Rebel XTi with a short lens. I'm just as likely to want to carry it, and it would be a much more versatile camera. So, if you're not going to buy this and you insist on buying something with more zoom, just go ahead and buy that S3 or maybe an S5 or DSLR, and be happy. The s2 is just an overgrown A610 with IS and a 12x zoom lens that can't match the rest of the camera in terms of quality, and I personally prefer to carry my FZ5 although its image quality is not as good as the s2 when shooting wide-angle. It's much better under zoom, though, and lighter, smaller, and easier to carry and shoot than the s2. You can't win. There is no one camera that is going to do it all for you...they all require you to compromise. Either on size or performance or cost. That is why I have 6 cameras, 3 midbodies and 3 point and shoots, I can walk into my house and find $1800 worth of camera equipment, and each time I go out shooting, I take a different camera and I get a different experience. I do not worry about being happy with just one and you will not be happy with just one, either. I have one rule: the farther I plan to go, the more my A610 comes with me, and the more likely I am to take two cameras. I know that at the least I will get some good shots. The other camera I can experiment with, and if I get anything good out of it, that's a bonus. And the thing about it is that I can put both my A610 and my A710 in my laptop bag, together they take up less space than any of my midbodies, alone, and it's almost impossible to drop and damage them, they're easy to carry onboard, I don't have to worry about them getting stolen out of my luggage or getting stolen or broken on the plane...they're a really hard travel combination to beat. And if one breaks or gets stolen, I have the other for backup. I get 6x with one and good wide-angle shots with the other. Next time I will try taking my FZ5 and see how that works out. Or maybe my SP500. I don't know :)
But the day that I take my S2 on a trip with me, will be the day that I am really ready to fly without a parachute. Plus, really, it's just not that good of a camera. It just really is not worth taking. But in the end, it's a decent camera and it's worth the experience, so I probably will take it some day, but I am not worried about it too much while I have my A610.....................................................................I just can't imagine taking a DSLR on a plane. But if I ever got one, it would have to be a Rebel XTi. I don't see going through all that trouble for anything less. The D40x doesn't have autobracketing, it has a CCD sensor, it doesn't have automatic sensor cleaning, or a proximity eye sensor...come on. Why bother with it? Why not just get an A640? If you're going to carry a DSLR, it has to be awesome. Not just good. Awesome. Otherwise, why bother? Why carry something that is 5x bigger and heavier than an A610, that isn't at least twice as good at all shots? Why buy a DSLR with a 6MP CCD sensor, no focus motor, no autobracketing? I can get a D40 body for $300. Why? For the ISO1600? I don't think so. Why not just get an F31? This is why I don't want to carry my s2! The ONLY redeeming features that the s2 has, compared to my A610, are the 12x zoom and autobracketing. Neither of which I really need. And I forgot about the IS until just now, that's how big of a deal it is when you have an A610. But without a doubt, sometimes 12x and IS come in very handy. The thing to do is to get one camera that has all the features that you want, or a least most of them, and another that is small, light, easy to carry and use, that takes good shots at ISO50-200. This is that camera. This is that baseline camera that everyone should have, at least. Then a decent midbody. And THEN a great DSLR. There is no sense in buying a crappy midbody or an average DSLR, you will almost never want to carry and shoot them. And you can't shoot them if they are back home because you didn't think they were worth carrying. The A610 allows you to rise above the yin and yang of camera ownership and use, and, just carry the dang thing. It's a good camera, it's small light and easy to carry and use, and you're going to use it if you carry it, and you will be happy with the shots, and you won't mind missing most, if not all, of the shots that you wish you had a 12x zoom to shoot, but you don't. You won't mind the fact that it doesn't have 10MP instead of 5. You won't mind the fact that it doesn't have autobracketing, or IS...the list of unnecessary features goes on and on. All you need to know is that it has great image quality, great focus, low noise ISO50-200, and is almost certainly not going to blow your shot if you know what you are doing and you take your time and do it right, and if you have even a 3" mini-tripod on you, you are covered, around the clock. You can't beat that with a DSLR. Even a 5MP DSLR with a 38m-120m F3-5 lens in 35mm require a foot-long, 700g camera. Just to take the same damm shot that you could take with an A610 and a mini-tripod. To beat an FZ5, it would need a 38-420mm F3.3 lens. that's a 3 foot long 2000g DSLR. Just to take the same shot as that FZ5, albeit with better coloration, a problem that my s2 solves at the expense of image sharpness. My entire SP500 is as long as a DSLR body and half the width and weight of a DSLR body. Ok it has unreliable focus but still, it will take a decent shot 75% of the time. DSLRs simply don't make any sense as 99% of the time, a point and shoot or at most a midbody can take the same shot almost as well as DSLR ever could. At least, for me. The tradeoff is that I'm not happy with just one camera. Be prepared to ride that same merry-go-round. If you don't buy an A610 first. Even if you do, you'll probably still buy at least a midbody. They're just too versatile to not have at least one. My only rule is that I am not buying a DSLR until I absolutely have to, other than that, I can own as many cameras as I want...as long as I want to shoot them. If I don't want to shoot them at all, I sell them. And the farther away I go from home, the more the a610 comes with me. Either it or now the A620 that I have waiting outside my door at home, while I write this. I still don't know where I would actually carry something larger than that, on a plane, without asking for it to get damaged or stolen. And I don't see having the A710 for very long, either way. The image quality of the A610 is just so much better, I can actually shoot it handheld at night under streetlights, and it is WAY easier to shoot from a tripod. All of that really cuts into the A710s utility as a travel camera, and its sole outstanding virtue is in its small size combined with its incredible ability to shoot handheld in very low light. Again, I have 6 cameras with significant overlap only in two of them, the A610 I have next to me and the A620 on my doorstep. The rest are all fairly distinguishable, and each is valuable and outstanding for different reasons. And none of them take really bad shots, I could live with the results from any one of them. That is both why I bought and kept them, and also why I kept buying other cameras. But the A620 is the last Canon point and shoot that I will buy, I have enough midbodies to last me, none of these cameras are really getting any better in terms of image quality, I now have a 7MP camera which has almost the same image size as a 10MP camera, and I draw the line at buying a DSLR because they cost so much, weigh so much, take up so much space, are so fragile, and give me so little in return over a point and shoot or midbody. And I do believe that I have said all of this at least 5 times. Enough. Do what you wish to do...but don't say that you haven't been warned...it really has taken me 2 years to get to this point where I can say, "...enough". And actually walk away from this. Is that because I am obsessive, or because there are so many crappy but affordable digital cameras out there with a great feature list and it is so hard to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones and the average ones? Or maybe...both? You find out and tell me :) I now pass the "point", to you! :)

...don't get me wrong I have no doubt that the DSLR can take shots that you can't take with a point and shoot or midbody. But what are those shots? Shots at high speed, with good image quality, or very long shots at sufficient speed to get good image quality.
"420mm ISO1600 shots without a tripod" type shots......................................................but who needs to take shots like that, that doesn't already have a DSLR? Don't be one of those guys who doesn't need to carry one of those monsters, who has one slung around his neck. Or one of those women who call themselves "photojournalists" who walk around with an old SLR and a 70-200mm manual-focus lens. Or someone who rides a bike through the park with a D40 and a 38-125mm lens hanging off their back, on the camera strap. I met a guy walking around the Mall in DC one night with an $8k Canon EOS 1Ds MkII and a 72-200mm IS lens protruding off his chest. He wasn't shooting it because he forgot to bring his remote shutter control! Obviously using the timer was beneath him. And for Gods' sake don't get one with a 28mm lens. Right off the top of my head, I can name 3 point and shoots by 3 different mfgs with a 28mm lens. Panasonic has an entire line of them. If you are sitting here reading this review through 44 replies, buy this camera or at least one of the A6xx series Canons, buy a cheap mini-tripod, and then go read about other things than cameras. Relax and enjoy your new Canon. Learn to get the most out of it. It will keep you happy for years. Do not worry that you cannot get clean shots at ISO1600 with it. That is the essential difference between it and a DSLR. Do not worry that you cannot shoot handheld in the dark with it, and do not worry that it doesn't have a low-noise ISO1600. You *can* shoot it handheld at night, OR you can use the minitripod. You just won't be able to take that 1-40s low-noise ISO1600 shot that you could take with a DSLR. If it can focus. You will always be limited by the focus. And you still have to carry the dang thing. Just think, do you really need that shot that way that much? And then what? What are you going to do with that $800 telescope in the meantime? And just think. All you have to do is drop it or bump something into it or the lens, just once. Don't put the lens on right, just one time. Crush the sensor, get something into the cavity, just once. Get it stolen, just once. See your DSLR on sale with a decent lens for half of what you paid for yours body-only, just once. Is taking that one shot with a DSLR worth it, when you can take it with an A610, almost as easily, then turn it off, flip the LCD display-inwards, put it in your pocket and walk away? And even if something happens to it, you can buy another one on eBay for under $200? You can walk into almost any camera store, Circuit City, Best Buy, all across the US and most of Europe, and buy another one for no more than $300? If you don't just buy one on eBay and have it overnighted to your hotel-room? How can you lose with this camera?!? I can buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a RebelXTi body-only! Another one for the cost of a decent lens! How could it possibly be worth 4x as much as an A610? I feel like Seinfeld: "It can't! It's not possible! Don't be so foolish!"...or go ahead and become a paparazzi and buy one.

so I got my A620 in today for testing and unquestionably it's slower than my A610...enough so that at full zoom I can take a shot at 1-200s with one camera and the other one is at 1-125s on the same shot. There is also a NR penalty, the shots are more hazy and more smoothed-out. The MP difference simply isn't worth the loss in performance and image quality.

Also neither of those last two "rants" were enough to keep from doing a precision (accurate?) comparison of my s2 to the D40 and RebelXTi, the two smallest DSLRs on the market. Actually they are the same size, plus or minus a couple of mm. The D40 is 10% wider and 20% taller and about 20% less wide in the lens direction, than my s2 is, with the lens retracted, not counting the lens cap. Even the Panasonic rangefinder camera (that they license from Leica) is shorter than the s2...with the lens out. They could easily put a shorter lens on it and make a camera with a 2/3rds or 4/3rds sensor that is the same size as the S2.

re: #46, yes, I could have put it down on the railing and shot it at ISO200 anyway, for a stable if slightly noisy shot, but there was another factor...the streets in Moscow are not all that clean, not to mention the subway railings. Especially not near the Kremlin. Kids live in the subway walkthroughs and street undercrossings, there, and people pee and spit on them, they're a mess. It is strange, you see a lot of amazingly well-dressed people walking around in Moscow (it's a very trendy city) and then there are street bums and lowlifes all over the place. I can see how if you can't really afford a house in the suburbs, and all the apartments look the same from the outside (like crap, like real crapholes, except for the new condos going up), the only real way to differentiate yourself is to either buy an expensive foreign car or buy some really snazzy clothes. Muscovites are good at both. Anyway I wasn't going to rest my camera on the walkway railing and then put it back into my bag.

ISO50 handheld at the Baltimore Inner Harbor

there are a number of reasons that I love this camera, but this should explain things better from the technical side.

more details from the technical side...
_NI refers to a file that has been processed by Neat Image, a $50 noise-reduction program.

anyway, did I mention that my a610 died? Yes, it has died. Not a peep, nothing. I carried on a trip with me to NJ and I never used it and when I came back I put batteries in it and tried to turn it on, nothing. Of course since I bought it off eBay I did not keep the receipt which gave me a 2 week return period, thinking that I would just toss it if it died, but it turned out to be a LOT better camera than I thought it would be...so I thought that it would not die. And of course it did die. Now I have no receipt so I cannot just exchange it for another camera, which the store would do if I had the receipt. I am gritting my teeth and going to get it fixed, it is too good a camera to not repair. If I can get it fixed for a reasonable price. Hopefully it is something simple.

Screw that, I just bought another one off eBay for $195, that is supposed to be in "like new" condition. With this camera, you can't lose. It might not have the zoom power of midrange cameras, it doesn't have IS, but it is easy to use and very flexible and fast, and takes great photos, with great detail. It's worth buying another one for $200 if it's almost new, and then "disposing" of the broken refurb job with the scratched lens barrel and lens, that I have, somehow. In the long run that reduces the load on my $800 Rebel and its $500 17-85 F4 IS USM lens. The A610 can't match it in low light, unless I put it on a tripod. And that is exactly what I got the Rebel to get away from. But there is no sense in using the Rebel for shots that I can take just fine with the A610 or my FZ5.
It's worth the $200 to keep from beating-up $1300 worth of DSLR hardware. So, you say, "why buy a $1300 DSLR?". Well, the Rebel XTi is an awesome camera for $800, put a good IS lens on it and it is even better. There are shots that it can take that the A610 simply cannot take, at least not handheld. And even then it has less NR than the A610, more resolution, I can shoot it RAW...it's not really a good comparison. The thing is that for certain shots, close-ups, flash shots, that sort of thing, there is no sense in shooting the Rebel. The FZ5 can do it just fine...but the FZ5 is nowhere near as fast as the A610 is. Or as easy to shoot off a tripod. It's just a good niche camera even if you have an FZ5 and a Rebel already. It's worth the $200 to throw it in your bag and shoot it when you don't really want to deal with pulling out a DSLR, or it isn't worthwhile to use it.
Plus the guy thew in a 2Gig SD card and said it was in "like-new" condition. It is like being offered a museum-quality painting when you have been in love with a postcard of it, for months. This camera is really that good, especially for $200.

ok actually I didn't buy one, I backed out of the deal after buying it :) I found my receipt for my a610 so I'm going to get it fixed for free. I didn't find it until after I decided not to buy another one...the guy was selling a mint a610, I convinced him to keep it. And I was going to pay the $100 or whatever it cost to get it fixed on Canons' flat-rate policy, thinking that I had thrown away the receipt...and then I found it!!!!! So now I can get it fixed only to have it break again while I am out on vacation :) Well, anyway. So what we have learned in all of this is that the A610 is effectively rated ISO120, 300, 500 and 1100, using a Rebel XTi or Panasonic FZ5 or Olympus SP-500 as a ruler. Its only problem is that it is a little noisy at ISO"200" (really ISO500) and a little more noisy at "ISO400" but this is all luminance noise, it's not chroma noise like with the S2 even at "IS0200" (really ISO400). The point is, if we can avoid using "IS0400", the A610 is quite livable. The point is that with any camera you want to avoid using the highest IS0 setting unless absolutely necessary, and it is only "absolutely necessary" if you are shooting for speed. Now back to my Rebel XTi review.

The fast response time is beacuse of the DIGIC II processor, not the batteries.

I totally disagree with this last owners opinion of the A610...

The batteries that came with the camera are "Alkaline" and therefore are somewhat useless!..
But, if he could have known better, he would have purchased the Metal rechargable, 2500mAh batteries...

These four metal batteries cost about $12 and are totally rechargable, and do last very, very long.
As a matter of fact, I don't see why Canon even includes these bad "Alkaline" batteries with this fine camera.

And, last week I went to the NY Theater, and took some most wonderful shots of my daughter performing on a Broadway stage, along with other performers.

I had a lousy seat....I was sitting in the very, very far end of the front row orchestra, and began to set up the A610 for some shots.

I set it for the"Manual" mode... Aperture set to as high as I could....Shutter speed as fast as I could get away with, I think it was around 250 shutter speed. And the ISO on this camera only goes up to 400, so that's what I set it at... and, I disabled the flash....so, "no flash"...

I focused, and shot away.....and when I got home, I downloaded it onto my Mac computer, and let me tell you, considering I was practically "discontorted" in my shooting position, I was very, very happy with the results.

Okay, I would have liked to have had a much higher ISO, but my results were far better than I could have expected even with ISO 400.

And, I liked the end result pictures so much, that I ended up making a "slideshow movie" of it with music, burnt it, put a sensational photo on the printable disk, and its now on DVD for all to see when I'm long gone from this world...

I mean this is a very inexpensive digital camera in my opinion, and for its price category, it made happy as a "pig n' mud"... it did ALMOST what my Canon Rebel XT could have done ( well, almost)...

So, for the price I paid ($204) I would have to say, its about tops in its class...
And as of this writing, the prices have surely dropped further...

And, no, I didn't want the Canon A620. 5 megapixels were fine enough for my needs.
And, I bought this A610 for my wife anyway. She'll put it in "auto" and have a nice
time with it...

I think that the last review is totally wrong. I have two little boys. We do alot of camping. This camera takes incredible pictures. I took some awsome pictures of fireworks. Yes it did use alot of battery power, but they were a little warn. I have had my camera A610 about 6 months. I have put 3 sets of batteries in it. I purchased a 512mb memory card. I have taken probally 600-700 pics. This camera is awsome. I recommend it to EVERYONE. THIS LAST PERSON SOUNDS LIKE THEY LIKE TO COMPLAIN> I LOVE MY A610!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!