Canon PowerShot A700
Affordable and Feature Rich

Canon’s ‘A’ series of digital point and shoot cameras has long been a popular choice among both serious photographers and average shutterbugs looking for something quick and reliable to take with them on vacations and family outings.

There is good reason for that; much like Nikon’s Coolpix line, the ‘A’ series cameras are reasonably priced, not too large and yet not too small, and come bundled with a good amount of manual control that amateurs can grow into. Canon’s newest offering, the A700 is no exception.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about this particular series of PowerShot models is the fact that Canon has consistently fought off the temptation to give consumers a basic square body in order to make the camera smaller. As small and portable as those cameras may be, the complete lack of a hand grip also makes them near useless in most shooting situations. Not so with the A700. Though a little larger then the average compact, the right of the body is dominated by a good solid grip that fits my medium sized hands with ease. Kudos to Canon for that one.

The A700 sports a very useful zoom range of 35mm on the wide end all the way up to 200mm on the telephoto. Quite an impressive range considering the small size of the camera and despite some purple fringing in bright light situations I found the lens quality to be more then acceptable for every day use. Coupled with a six mega-pixel sensor and you should have no problem making usable 8 x 10 prints off the A700.

Unfortunately Canon didn’t deem it was necessary to include image stabilization in the lens which makes the telephoto end not as useful as it could be. To make up for this Canon’s engineers did add an option to boost the ISO of the A700 all the way to 800 for low light conditions. It’s a bit of a compromise and I personally found images taken at ISO 800 to be much too grainy for any sort of real use.

Still, despite this fact I hold the A700 in high respect as a good photographic tool. It’s refreshing to see that Canon is still incorporating easily accessible manual controls into their compact models. Full manual control, aperture priority, and shutter priority modes can be had by simply turning the main mode dial at the top of the camera, much like modern day SLR’s. When using a camera like this it’s nice to know that all my years taking photography classes in college didn’t go to waist.