SMJ Solutions

Digital Photography

January 5th, 2006

I was an early adopter of the digital camera, having purchased an Olympus 1.3 mexapixel model back in April of 2000. We were content with our older camera, but when my wife accidentally dropped it on the hard tile of our kitchen floor, I had to fight back a smile. Now I had a perfectly good excuse to upgrade.

After much research, we purchased the Canon PowerShot A610. We read the in-depth reviews of the camera at DPreveiw.com and many of the customer comments at Amazon.com. We considered purchasing it at AbesOfMaine.com (which had great prices on digital cameras), but ended up buying it at Costco.com because of their unbeatable return policy — which was especially important since my wife has a propensity to drop expensive electronics on hard tile floors.

So far, it has met and exceeded all of our expectations. The photos we have taken so far with the new camera have been bright, clear, and crisp. The USB 2.0 connection to the camera makes transferring the larger image files quick and easy. We haven’t used the included software yet, but why would you when Picasa is incredibly useful and totally free? The My Colors mode is fun to play around with, but isn’t very practical otherwise, and the movie mode is great for quick little clips to email to Grandma.

With our older camera, we were constantly annoyed by all of the delays; taking the picture, viewing and zooming, and downloading all had built-in delays. With the Canon PowerShot A610 we haven’t noticed any delays at all — all functions are lightning fast, we haven’t had to wait for anything. I have been very impressed with the overall performance of the camera. Even the battery life has been impressive: we got the camera just before Christmas and used it heavily all through the holidays without replacing the standard alkaline batteries that came in the box.

Just as a disclaimer, I’m not a professional photographer, I’m not even a shutterbug or hobbyist. I simply want to take good picures and have solid performance and use some neat features every once in a while. Given my requirements, I can’t recommend the Canon PowerShot A610 highly enough; it’s a great piece of hardware.

Entry Filed under: Hardware

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