Canon PowerShot A5

In the camera industry, Canon's name is one of the best known and most respected around. Thanks to the company's long experience in the traditional camera market, its transition to digital photography has been relatively smooth. Despite looks that lent new meaning to the concept of functional design, Canon's last representative in the pages of PC Pro, the PowerShot 600, won itself a coveted Quality award (reviewed issue 38, p122).

The compact PowerShot A5 is the first in a new range of Canon digital cameras to attempt to continue in the same successful vein. Its design owes a lot to the company's highly popular range of Ixus APS (advanced photo system) cameras. It isn't quite as small or as light as its APS cousins, but the PowerShot A5 is small enough to fit comfortably into an inside jacket pocket. Its exceptionally solid build quality also means it should easily cope with everyday use and abuse.

Inevitably, the PowerShot A5 is a higher-resolution device than the PowerShot 600, but its 810,000 pixel CCD (charge coupled device) can't match the so-called 'mega-pixel' cameras that have emerged recently. The Olympus C1400-L (reviewed issue 41, p184) and the Kodak DC210 (reviewed issue 40, p183) sported CCDs with a total of over one million pixels. There's no zoom function either, so on paper the PowerShot A5 looks like it still has some catching up to do.

When taking pictures, the PowerShot A5 gives you two quality modes to choose from and three resolutions: there's fine or normal quality in either 1,024 x 768 or 512 x 384 resolutions which use JPEG compression to varying degrees, and a CCD Raw mode which produces uncompressed 960 x 768 resolution shots. You shouldn't need to resort to the lower resolution modes very often, especially when you consider that you'll fit an average of 45 pictures in the fine 1,024 x 768 mode onto the 8Mb CompactFlash card supplied. If you just can't sacrifice the quality, each uncompressed shot takes up about 940Kb of memory, so you'll be able to fit an average of eight of these on the card.

Apart from standard aspect ratio pictures, the PowerShot A5 can also be used to produce pseudo-panoramic photos using its 'stitch assist' mode and the PhotoStitch software that comes with the camera. In this mode you take one picture, which is displayed on the right-hand side of the screen while you line up the next shot. The next step is to download the pictures from the camera into the software and stitch the pictures. It's an innovative feature, but laborious to carry out and isn't something I envisage being used too much.

The camera is surprisingly easy to use and configure. Navigating through the menu system on the 2in colour TFT LCD screen is straightforward. From here you can select the different quality modes, adjust exposure settings when not in automatic mode and turn automatic review on and off, so you can see the results of a shot immediately after you've taken it. There are also options to dim the LCD and use a power save mode in order to conserve battery life. The battery, incidentally, is a rechargeable NiMH (nickel metal hydride) and the camera also comes with a separate charger so you don't have to leave it hooked up to the mains.

Selecting the Play or Multi modes using the rotating switch on top of the camera lets you review the pictures already on the CompactFlash card, either full screen or nine at a time in thumbnail mode. Flash modes (automatic, on, off and red-eye reduction) and the macro function, which has an impressive range of 90mm to 500mm, can be accessed without reference to the menu.