Last year, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100 wowed us with its remarkably crisp picture quality. Though the A590 IS retails for far less than that camera, it manages to produce photos that are nearly on a par with those from the T100. While the A590 IS's automatic white balance does a great job for a camera in its price range, it's not quite as good as the automatic white balance in the T100. The A590 IS does a good job of neutralizing colors shot under incandescent light, but leaves a hint of warmth. It also leaves more of a green cast than we'd like to see on a camera like this when shooting under fluorescent lighting. Its tungsten setting did a wonderful job of neutralizing our very yellow tungsten hot lights. While noise remains extremely low from ISO 80 to 200, we did see some noise even at the camera's lowest sensitivity setting. Still, at these lower ISOs pictures look very good for a camera of this price, and fine textures such as fabric and fur appear consistently crisp. Noise becomes prominent at ISO 400, though details still come through clearly. Like most compact cameras, the A590 IS produces significant grain at ISO 800 and its maximum of ISO 1,600, covering the picture and damaging details with a fuzzy sheen. Overall, the A590 IS produces very nice images and can even yield usable small prints at ISO 800, which is impressive for a camera of its class.
Whether you're just looking for an inexpensive, flexible camera or a secondary shooter for when you're not schlepping around your SLR, the Canon PowerShot A590 IS is a great choice. Its high image quality, broad feature set, and fast shutter help ensure that you'll get the shots you want, and that they'll look good. It's not the prettiest or slimmest camera on the market and it takes far too long to recycle the onboard flash, but this sub-$200 shooter will still generally serve you well. You'd be hard pressed to find better pictures for the price.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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