Canon PowerShot A640

Pros: Great color, lots of detail, fast performance

Cons: No image stabilization

Summary: I upgraded from a 4-year-old Sony camera, and am very impressed with the A640. I did a fair amount of research, and many other cameras in this category had performance issues, such as shutter lag and slow processing or flash recharge time.

The image quality of the pictures is excellent. Although many articles tell you that anything over 5 megapixels is superfluous, the 10 megapixels are quite handy if you want to crop a shot -- they still look perfect even if you are only using a portion of the photo. The camera even handles shadows well, with virtually no noise and good detail. Color is very good.

The only thing keeping the score from being a perfect 10 is that I wish the camera came with the Image Stabilization that the A710 has, because that would assist in low-light situations such as indoor photos without a flash. The ISO 400 and 800, like on most cameras, are very noisy. ISO 100 and 200 make many, but not all, low-light shots without a flash possible. In any event, we chose this one over the A710 because of the battery life and speed of performance (the A710 has only two AA batteries, which affect these things). The camera handles indoor flash shots quite well, and the flash intensity is adjustible if needed.

In any event, the camera is very easy to use, both in fully automatic and manual modes. The screen tells you where it's focusing on each shot, which is quite useful. There is no shutter lag, and its movie feature is quite useful. If you get a big memory card, you can take a good deal of good quality video (8 minute limit is per clip, not per memory card).

Very happy with this purchase...