October 2, 2009

Budget Cam with Good Mainstream Features
By Luis Anthony G. Oliveros
Published in the August 2009 print edition of PC World Philippines

Canon PowerShot A480
P9,450
www.canon.com.ph

Released during the first quarter of this year as an update to the PowerShot A470, the Canon PowerShot A480 is definitely for those who want good quality photos from their digital cameras at an affordable price but can do without having to tweak the camera settings for every shot. Frankly, it’s not really the prettiest kid in the playground with its boxy exteriors but it does carry the stylish toy camera vibe with a choice of metallic blue, black, silver and red variants and complemented by pale silver trimmings. With its 92.1x62x31.1mm profile tipping the scale at just 140g, this point-and-shooter has an excellent build quality and is compact enough for packing in most pockets and bags and it feels solidly comfortable in your hand during use. It even slaps in a subtly raised metallic sheet to its left side panel to offer a better grip.

The power button and the shutter are naturally located on top of the unit while a battery compartment (for two AA batteries) is at the bottom along with the memory card slot. The controls at the back have been kept to a minimum with a zoom rocker, a playback button, the Mode and Menu buttons and a five-way D-pad. This button layout is pretty basic and simple, offering an intuitive usage even for newbies. The D-pad is essentially for navigating through the camera’s unfussy graphic user interface, giving you access to the cam’s features, functions and settings. Next to these is the 2.5-inch LCD display which doesn’t pack in a lot in terms of screen resolution, with a pixel count of just 115,000 dots with the resulting images appearing a tad bit grainy at the very least. Despite this, it has considerably good horizontal viewing angles though we find it a challenge to view outdoors on a bright day.

Typically found in point-and-shooters and compact cameras, the A480 has the standard Auto shooting mode accompanied by 12 preset scene modes to choose from and includes the usual array of options such as Portrait, Night Snapshot and Indoor among others. However, if you’re feeling a little bold and you think the settings could use a little tweaking, you can always switch to the Program shooting mode. This mode gives you free reign over your still photos, allowing you to make adjustments to the ISO (which ranges from 80 to 1600), white balance (with six preconfigured ratings) and color effects, among others.

This cam features a quick start up where you’re good to go roughly a second after hitting the power button. During usage, we noticed a gap between shots when we enabled the Continuous Shooting mode in bright environments while a slower four-second idle time were spent between shots recharging the built-in flash when we enabled it. Also worth mentioning is the lack of any form of image stabilization or even a decent mode for capturing action shots, so if you want to capture photos or videos of the latest live sporting events, you may want to check out other digital camera models lest you risk capturing a generally healthy amount of motion blurred images.

The A480 has a maximum resolution of 10 megapixels and is accompanied by a 3.3x optical zoom, which is a distinct upgrade its previous seven-megapixel predecessor, the A470. It yielded considerably good quality photos in JPEG during our tests. Indoor shots produced bright images with good clarity and colors that pop. The blacks, however, looked a little pale than they ought to be. For outdoor pictures, on the other hand, we noticed a subtle deficiency in terms of sharpness with some of the brightly lit areas of the shot looking too soft and exhibiting some amount of noise. Some of the colors, particularly cool ones like blue and green, also looked bland but modifying the settings further remedies this.

Aside from taking still shots, the A480 does an OK job with videos which it churns out in the AVI format at 30fps. But again, without image stabilization, we got a handful of jitters and sudden movements like quick pans and tilts resulted in somewhat blurry scenes when we took it for a test run. This shouldn’t be an issue if you plan to just set it up to continuously shoot from a single angle with a tripod sturdily propping it up, but it’s trial and error if you’re doing the cam-in-hand route. The integrated mic proved to be sensitive enough to pick up sounds, albeit with a tinny quality, even from eight feet away.

To sum it up, the Canon PowerShot A480 is a straightforward entry-level point-and-shooter, with a nice balance of mainstream features that produces good quality photos and decent videos at a price that won’t break the bank. It’s an excellent starting point for first-time digital camera users like students who want to jumpstart photography as a hobby.