Canon PowerShot A3000 IS

Opinion: Hello,

My wife recently bought an A3000IS. She wanted a small, cheap, take-anywhere camera for family snaps and travel. I was hoping for something with more manual controls, but budget won out! Overall, the camera is a nice surprise, providing you judge it for what it is -a small, cheap compact with reasonably intelligent auto settings and plenty of scene modes. It is not meant to compete with DSLRs or high end compacts!

Here are our impressions after six months of use:

Pros:

Well-made considering it only cost £65.00 in UK, & has optical image stabilization.
Mode dial useful for quickly switching between common settings.
10 shot self timer great for setting-up self portraits with children.
Metal tripod thread.
Good exposure for portraits indoors with flash.
Li-ion battery allows camera to be physically smaller.
Battery life good - although recommend getting a spare for travelling and if you use the flash a lot.
Has survived being dropped a few times!

Cons:
Auto white balance indoors can be a bit off.
Blown highlights in contrasty scenes.
JPEG compression too high for my liking - but not really an issue if you are only printing 6x4 for albums or posting on a website.

No internal memory, so you'll need to buy an SD card to get you started if you haven't got one already. We are using Sandisk Extreme SD 1 GB & 4 GB cards without problems.

Opinion: The dial mode function is the most handsome criteria that catches my attention. It is a very straight forward camera that defines what is a point and snap camera is all about. The AF is acceptably fast enough for a p&s. Although there are many more faster models, the dial mode function enable the users to select a suitable mode in just no time. The height of the body also fits in our hands.

The cons are the buttons are quite hard to press maybe it is meant to be heavy duty type? Not sure

Opinion: The camera seems a bit cheap compared to cameras with the same price. But it takes good pictures, both indoor and outdoor. When ISO is low(100) they are quite sharp, with ISO of 400 or bigger they start to be blury.
It's quite fastin booting and shotting, i'm using a 4Gb class 6 SDHC and it writes to the card in no time at all.
In auto mode sometimes it takes a while focusing and chosing the rigth settings, and sometimes is out of focus, I usually shot in Program mode.
Overall is a nice camera that takes good pictures for the price it costs.

Opinion: I'm not a professional photographer,but i know a good picture when i see one. The a3000 is a good camera with a nice price-to-performance ratio. Images are properly exposed,and the camera is good enough to change to macro / landscape in auto mode.

Flash pics are ok,not overly washed. The camera takes good pictures (only 1 in 10 pictures seems a little bit blurry indoor, but nevertheless,im very much happy with my purchase considering i paid a small price for a great camera!)

Opinion: this is a piece of crap ! 150 dollars
and it feels so cheap and pictures and not great
dont waist your money and buy something better for the same price