Canon PowerShot A480

I bought the Canon PowerShot A480 after I broke my last digital camera. It was on offer in Argos at the time for £60.00 and i thought that was a good price for a digital camera. I had also had Canon before so thought that it would be familiar to use.

It has been a great camera so far. It has a nice sleek design and is black and silver all over which i think is really trendy. Whilst i don't think this is the most important thing about a camera it is always nice when you pull a nice looking camera out of your bag.

To switch the camera on is very simple. There is a on/off button on the top of the camera next to the big silver button you press to actually take the photo. When you switch it on you are greeted with a blue screen saying canon which is quickly replaced by the view through the viewfinder. You can easily zoom in or out using the button at the top to the right of the screen. There is also a circular type button next to the screen which you can use to have quick access to your flash settings and the self timer.

Also next to the screen is a mode and menu button. When you press mode it allows you to choose a scene such as indoor,sunset,fireworks, long shutterbeach, aquarium,foliage, snowsuper macro, portrait , night snapshot or kids and pets. As a rule i seem to have mine set on kids and pets- it seems to work well for what i use the camera for which is predominantly pictures of my son! I do change it if i go to the beach though. The camera will automatically set on to the mode it feels it is best depending on the light and things so you don't have to use this feature unless you want an actual feature.

It is also in the mode menu that you can choose to switch the camera to movie mode and record a short viedo. I wouldn't recommend doing long videos on here but it is fine for minutes!

When you press menu it brings up your main camera settings and i am not going to pretend i know what all this is about. I have left mine set as they came but i am sure anyone who has real camera knowledge could go in there and change things if required!

The camera has a 3.3x optical zoom, which is plenty in my opinion for this type of camera. The pictures are usually clear and bright though if you zoom in too much they are then fuzzy however i think this is probably a flaw with most digital cameras like this. I also found that when I went to a concert recently that the camera struggled to focus at times and I needed to press the button used to take a picture slightly, then release it and try again to get any kind of focus which was a bit of a pain as I missed some good shots really.

You will of course need to buy a memory card with the camera as it doesn't have much in build memory at all, in fact I think it took about five or so pictures before saying the memory was full initially. Memory cards can be picked up quite cheaply these days though.

Linking the camera to your computer is very easily done in that you simply attach the lead to the camera and then to the USB port on your computer and initially allow the computer to find the software required. Once you have done this the camera will allow you open up the pictures on your computer and save them or edit them as you wish too.

The only negative things I have found so far is that it didn't come with a case, though I am sure these can be bought cheaply enough. The other point is that the camera requires 2x AA batteries. My last camera came with a rechargable camera battery and a charger and i have found that this one eats batteries! I solved this problem by just buying rechargable ones and these last much longer!
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I actually dropped this camera as well recently and the screen has cracked but it still works perfectly well so all in all i would say it is a really good little camera but on the basic side! For the price I paid I am quite happy with the camera and it is still working and so I cannot grumble considering that I dropped it! It is a basic camera but takes decent pictures and is best suited to general use for a family in my opinion.

Thank you for reading my review. A version of which appeared on dooyoo.