Canon PowerShot A470 (Blue)
Starting at: $189.91
CNET Editors' Review
CNET Editors' Rating
- Reviewed by: Will Greenwald
- Reviewed on:
The good: Inexpensive; fast performance.
The bad: Noisy pictures; chunky design.
The bottom line: For the money, you'd have a hard time finding a better snapshot camera.
You don't need to pay a lot to get a pretty good digital camera. Solid budget models are becoming less expensive and offering better performance every year. The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples of this trend. With a price tag less than $150, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn't the prettiest camera available and it doesn't have any flashy features, but for the price, it's hard to beat.
Canon tries to give the A470 a much-needed injection of style by offering four color choices: gray, blue, red, and orange. Unfortunately, colorful ... Expand full review
You don't need to pay a lot to get a pretty good digital camera. Solid budget models are becoming less expensive and offering better performance every year. The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples of this trend. With a price tag less than $150, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn't the prettiest camera available and it doesn't have any flashy features, but for the price, it's hard to beat.
Canon tries to give the A470 a much-needed injection of style by offering four color choices: gray, blue, red, and orange. Unfortunately, colorful accents can't hide the camera's chunky, unattractive design. It feels like a king-size candy bar, measuring almost 4 inches long, 2 inches thick, and more than an inch and a half wide. At 7.6 ounces with an SD card and two AA batteries, it also weighs in as one of the heftiest budget cameras available. The lens and LCD screen both jut out uselessly from the body, giving it a bumpy, uneven feel. Compared with the huge selection of budget point-and-shoots on the market measuring just an inch thick or less, the A470 is downright huge. On the bright side, the camera's large body makes it easy to grip and hold, and its wide design leaves room for large, simple controls that even bigger thumbs can comfortably manipulate.
A barebones feature set accompanies the A470's barebones price tag. The camera's 38-to-132mm-equivalent, f/3.0-5.8 lens offers a slightly longer than usual reach, but offers a narrower field of view than most snapshot cameras' 35mm-equivalent-or-wider lenses. A 2.5-inch, 115,000-pixel screen is the only method of framing your shot, and can be difficult to use on sunny days. You won't find a lot of controls on the A470, but adjustable ISO, exposure controls, and manual white-balance settings offer some flexibility when shooting. It features the standard handful of scene preset modes, plus a movie mode that can record QVGA (320x240) movies at 30 frames per second, or VGA (640x480) movies at a slower-than-usual 20fps. Finally, the A470 includes face-detecting autofocus and autoexposure, an increasingly popular feature that's still a bit surprising to find on such an inexpensive model.
Despite a very slow flash, the A470 proved to be a surprisingly fast shot. In our lab tests, the camera took 2.1 seconds from power-on to first shot, and could capture a new picture every 1.4 seconds after with the flash disabled. With the onboard flash turned on, however, that wait exploded to 5 seconds. With our high-contrast (bright light) target, the camera's shutter lagged a respectable 0.5 second, and with our low-contrast (low-light) target, the shutter lagged a truly remarkable 0.9 second. Most cameras, especially budget models, tend to lag over a second when shooting subjects in low light. Between the low shutter lag and long flash recycle time, the A470 proves bittersweet in low light. While it can snap a shot very quickly at first, you'll be waiting a while before it can fire the flash again. Finally, the A470's continuous shooting mode captured 30 7-megapixel shots in 33 seconds for a rate of 0.9 frame per second.
Hide ReviewCompare to other digital cameras
Compare selectedUser Reviews
See all user reviewsRating Breakdown
Most recent user reviews
Showing 3 of 3 reviews
"Okay Camera with more Cons than Pros" By JulesHobbo
Pros: Big Screen
Cons: Heavy
Expensive
Big
Not many photo options
Summary: Okay Camera but for the price get better. I have had this camera for a couple of years and is great for happy snaps but not much else!!
"Excellent camera.. all the way around!" By indy46222
Pros: EVERYTHING.... real good pictures nearly every time for a low end camera. I LOVE MY CAMERA!!
Cons: this is my third Canon camera, and I HAVE NEVER EVER had a single problem. Canon simply knows how to put a good equipment out there. They don't play around.
Summary: I have had quite a few digital cameras over the years, and will say without hesitation it would be EXTREMELY hard for me to look at any other brand besides CANON. They simply deliver an outstanding product. My camera has sustained hard punishment, and I use it an average 20 ... Expand full review
Specifications
See full specsQuick Specs
- Product Type: Digital camera - Compact
- Resolution: 7.1 megapixels
- Digital video input format: AVI
