Canon PowerShot A85

Strip off the PowerShot's badges and you'd be hard pushed to tell the A85 from its predecessor, the formerly A-Listed A70. Canon claims the A70 is its most successful camera ever, so has clearly adopted the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' philosophy when designing the A85. This is no bad thing, as the half-metal, half-plastic case is well built and comfortable to use.

The A85 is still powered by four AA batteries, so it's relatively heavy at 300g. It keeps the cost down as there's no charger in the box, only a set of alkalines. According to Canon, these are good for around 250 shots.

On the rear, the larger 1.8in LCD is an improvement on the A70's 1.5in unit. It's fairly easy to see outdoors, but thankfully there's an optical viewfinder as well. Button layout has been rehashed for the better, with a four-way navigation pad and more intuitive select button. Also new is the Direct Print button, with support for PictBridge.

The same 3x optical zoom with a respectable f2.8-f4.8 aperture is present, but there's now a 4-megapixel CCD. Thankfully, the A85 is just as easy to use as its predecessor and Canon has also added a new Scene option to the top dial. This attempts to produce better shots in tricky conditions such as the beach and fireworks parties.

When you want more control, there are aperture and shutter priority modes as well as full manual. In addition to the panorama mode, VGA movie clips with sound can be shot at up to 30 seconds in length. Detail is respectable, but the 10fps frame rate is disappointing.

Indoors, the A85 performs well. Flash coverage is good and exposures are generally accurate. Outdoors, images are sharp, with well-saturated colours. When there's harsh backlighting, the A85 is less impressive, and some images were noisier and softer than we'd have liked. However, detail resolution is respectable and macro ability is top notch. Our only major gripe is the shutter lag, which is a lot slower than it should be these days.

But with a 32MB CompactFlash card in the box, the A85 is still great value. Image quality isn't the best we've seen from a 4-megapixel camera, but few people will be disappointed.

Author: Jm Martin