Page 1 of Canon PowerShot A510 for £129.95 Inc P&P

Been looking round the web for of these new Canon 3.2mp cameras
and the cheapest I`ve found so far is from 7dayshop
£126.00 + £3.95 P&P.
If any one finds it cheaper let us know (Inc Bensherman2)

I saw a digitial camera for sale in Superdrug today... now normally a camera in a pharmacy wouldn`t interest me for obvious reasons- but it was reduced to £70, and the spec sounds as good as this one. It`s by a company called Concord if anyone knows what I`m talking about... I`m very tempted to buy it me, but would a camera like this Canon one be better suited?

The A510 sells for £122.32 incl delivery at Dabs.com.

Don`t buy the Concord camera at all costs! By far the best of the compact digital cameras is Canon. Cheap rubbish like the concord suffer from lack of manual controls, poor macro, dark pictures in poor light, poor barrel distortion, high shutter lag, etc, etc.

However, Canon cameras usually suffer the least fringing of all the compact makes of cameras (fringing means purple tints around edges of pictures which can occur on digital pictures and is worse on budget cameras), has a 9 point auto-focus (again, I believe Canon are the only ones with this) and exellent range of manual controls. Also, worth mentioning is the time to take the camera from sleep mode to image capture. It is only 1.5 seconds with the camera. I don`t know how long it is for the Concord but it will be nowhere near that.

You get what you pay for. The Canon is well worth the extra for better build quality and extensive range of features. It is expensive compared to other well known brands (such as Olympus, Minolta, etc) but there are so many features to Canon cameras that they are well worth the money.

Mike

Thanks for the info.

I have been looking for a while for a decent "snaps" camera and to date have yet to find a reasonably priced (sub £150) decent camera.

I have just purchased a canon pixma IP400 printer (£99.99 from Argos, PC World etc) and the photo print quality on decent paper is excellent - it has a PictBridge link that allows direct printing from a camera / dv camcorder

Bearing this in mind do you think that the A510 is a good bet?

Thanks

I have had a whole raft of Canons and have nothing but praise for them. Am currently on an a95 but a mate has the a510 & he is delighted with it. You`ll also get the zoombrowser software which will integrate with your Canon printing software too. The A510 will be more than suitable for your needs & don`t get caught in the megapixel race, 3MP will be more than enough for quality prints.
Try
www.dcresource.com &
www.steves-digicams.com &
www.dcresource.com

for reviews on this camera. For "snaps" & then getting into photography, the Canon a range is a real good bet.
HTH...All the best...Flyer

Jezbar,

The A510 is certainly a good buy and as Flyer said, the number of mega-pixels means absolutely nothing when it comes to picture quality. A good quality 2 mega pixel camera will give you far superior results to a cheap 4 megapixel camera. The number of megapixels determines the maximum size of the resultant photo and if you are not planning to have anything bigger than standard prints (4x6) then 2 megapixels is enough - reason being that at 4x6 with 300 dots per inch, the whole picture takes 1200x800 pixels, which is approximately 2 megapixels. Yes you can print at higher than 300 dpi but the human eye cannot see any more.

If you want larger prints then go for more mpixels but of course choose a quality camera and also don`t be fooled by ones that quote the number of "interpolated" mpixels.

Now to answer your question as to why the A510 is such a good budget camera (albeit it is certainly not cheapest in its class) is:-

- 4 x optical zoom with less barrel distortion than many other cameras of 4x optical
zoom
- excellent build quality (metal/polycarbonate body)
- Canon`s reputation of reduction if fringing
- Shutter lag of less than 0.1 seconds - this is incredible for a point and shoot camera
- Fast auto focus
- Although it is sold as a simple point and shoot camera, it has plenty of manual adjustments for the expert user

There are many, many other features of this camera too numerous to mention here. For reviews and comparisons against its competitors have a look here:-
http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/f-4-p-7.html

Thanks for the good advice guys. I think I`m going to buy the Canon one mentioned here, unless anyone ahs any better suggestions :)