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Canon PowerShot A400
The Canon PowerShot A400 is basically a point-and-shoot camera suitable for beginner photographers. Available in a variety of colours like green, silver, sky blue etc, the overall designing of the camera is impressive. The well placed controls only enhance the styling.
Considering it’s a camera for starters, the features aren’t extensive. But the ones integrated do perform reasonably well.
You will come across eight scene modes, prominent among them are Portrait, Night Scene and Underwater. In addition, there is the stitching function infused for panorama shots. Maximum print till which the photos will look attractive is 5x7. You can also combine audio with pictures and of course make use of the video shooting capability of A400.
Quite a few of the basic features are present. Among them you can utilise the light-metering modes, manual exposure mode, white-balance setting and the available ISO speed choices. What’s not awe-inspiring though is the absence of shutter-priority modes which is quite a common feature in ‘point-and- shoot’ category of cameras.
The user manual shipped with the camera is quite useful and so are the abundance of softwares like ArcSoft VideoImpression, Canon ZoomBrowser EX, Canon PhotoStitch, and Canon PhotoRecord etc. But you might find menu navigation a little too intricate for a start and the speed of navigation isn’t rapid either.
There a few genuine shortcomings of A400 like the less than average 2.2X optical zoom and the diminutive 1.5 inch LCD while the 45mm minimum focal length won’t facilitate taking good landscape images.
Even so, the picture quality was not awful. On the contrary, A400 the images taken had accurate colour representation and exposure in daylight conditions. Even close-up photography in standard light was striking up to a distance of five centimetres. Maybe the razor-sharp finishing to the picture was missing. But for a 3.2 megapixel camera with limited ability it delivers satisfactorily.
However, the performance wavers as the flash comes into picture with snaps looking jaded mainly due to the lack of effective low-light settings. You can use the ISO settings to improve the condition but only if you are willing to bear the excess noise emitted in the process.
The camera takes around five seconds to boot-up but recycling is horrible at 9 seconds between shots. Shutter lag is reasonably acceptable but the viewfinder is rather unimpressive and not much better is the battery life.
Despite having a few pitfalls, with some impressive basic features and good picture quality, it will cater to rookie photographers.
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Some good features but battery is horrible
I purchased this camera some months back and though it has some relatively good features, the overall result should have been better. Among the features I liked were the styling of the camera, a few of the scene modes and even the metering and white balance settings. But there are some other features which are atrociously disappointing. Especially the flash which is close to useless in the night. I tried the panorama effect too but didn’t come of as intended. And my biggggggest grudge is the battery. And this b’coz at the end of the day the image quality is good but the battery doesn’t last long enough for u 2 take enough pics.
User Rating : 6 /10  (
by :
preetice on
Mon, 26 Sep 2005 08:45:36 GMT
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