Canon A70 Point and Shoot Compact Camera

A No Nonsense Review: 8 out of 10 stars

1. The A70 is a fantastic point and shoot camera made by Canon. I've had this camera since Nov 2003, and taken thousands of pictures. This camera has a very sturdy case and is quite durable. It will take the punishment of birthdays and trips and pretty much anything you can throw at it. I've never dropped it, but it has been carried across the US in my pocket, and hasn't had any problems yet. This camera has paid for itself many times over, and it always produces top notch fotos from a point and shoot. Orginally I purchased it for $250 from Newegg, and now I think it is around $150.

Versatility

The A70 has plenty of manual controls for those users who are looking to manually focus or over expose their picture for what ever reason. I also like the versatility of capturing a movie in the heat of the moment. Movie quality is pretty good. It has 3 settings for movies; little, medium, and big (hehe). The smallest setting (120X ?) will capture for almost 3 mins. The highest quality is 640X480. Unfortunately at this level it will only allow 30 Seconds of recording. The quality is really great, but the length of the capture bites. This would unfortunately be one of the down falls of the camera, but hey, it's not a camcorder.

Specs; what you need to know to operate this camera

Not much. Turn it on, make sure that the dial at the top is set on AUTO. Take pictures. This camera has a 3X optical Zoom and is pretty descent. There can be some focusing issues when you take pictures using zoom. The camera uses compact flash recordable media. I believe it is the cheapest media of all these days. It uses AA Batteries. 4 of them to be exact. If you use the flash much, it can chew through the batteries pretty quick. Otherwise, it can operate pretty efficiently. I typically go through a set of batteries a month. That is average use. Take 10 pictures, then don't touch the camera for awhile. Just for safety, I try to have a back up set. But if I forget, you can usually just take the batteries out of the camera, wait about 10 mins, and you can usually squeeze a few more pictures out of them. I know. I'm a bum.

Conclusion

This Camera kicks butt.

Good Pictures

Decent Battery life

Cheap media

Good manual functions

Cons

lil' big for the pocket

Short movie at the highest movie setting

Not the best focusing with the zoom

If you buy this camera you will not be let down. The 3.2 Megapixel pictures are very clear and good. It is a very good reliable camera. My sis' got the A95 which is practically the same camera. Just 5 megapixel resolution. Good good camera