Canon PowerShot A495

I love to take pictures and more recently of wildlife and I have a few cameras and to be honest it is a slight obsession of mine to keep buying them.

I love Canon I find they offer the best cameras there is and some might disagree but this cameras the Canon PowerShot A495 is one I really did enjoy using.

My camera is red and I have seen it in grey and even black so there is a few options for colours around for this camera.

The camera on first appearances looks stylish and I think the colour helps make this happen. You have a nice ruby style colour on the front and back and around the rim is the black which sort of separates the back and the front of the camera.

The front is kind of messy with all the logos and information about what the camera is and this perhaps could have been limited. They could have displayed just the Canon logo and it would look decent enough.

On the back there is a 2.5 inch LCD screen to show what pictures you have taken and what you are currently looking at. You have various other buttons as well and these range from zooming in and out, altering if you want to video a scene or take pictures and even editing some pictures there and then.

The 10 megapixels was always a highlight the more megapixels the better and I find that sometimes this is true and sometimes it is not but it does work pretty well. The best example would be a 7mp camera took a picture and so did this camera which is 10mp and you noticed the difference immediately so the sharpness and texture of the picture is much more better. This does not mean all cameras are the same as each will produce different results.
I have another camera which is 5mp and it can produce better results then this 10mp camera so it varies on the brand, the model and the features but in theory the more megapixels the idea is the better outcome in results.

What this camera also has is some decent features like the red eye reduction which is extremely good because most pictures of animals and usually family end up with red eye. Before I had this feature I would discard this picture to the recycle bin and try and produce another masterpiece but this really does remove the red eye which saves me time and effort.
Also you will find that with the potential to remove red eye on the spot it means you do not need to worry about light which causes the red eye. My pets recently and over the Christmas period were difficult in there poses due to the red eye pictures I had taken but for once I could keep those pictures instead of deleting them so it saves on time consuming.

Some of the types of pictures you can take vary with names so you have the portrait picture option which I use for taking pictures of people not up close but close enough. You also you have others like pets and children which is nice because you can fit more people into the picture.

The movies you play if you wish are usually 30fps (frames per second) and this is a good number and it offers a good quality movie at the end which is played in an AVI file. This can also work on DivX DVD players as well should you want to transfer the video over at all.

You have a self timer which allows you to relax and get a pose ready and you have between 2 and 10 seconds for this option as well. You can use SD or SDHC memory cards as well and others which I am not familiar with but people can look up these in the manual.

I found the zoom on this camera very good and sometimes with a camera when you zoom into an image you sort of lose focus and it becomes very blurry and hard to work out what your viewing. With this camera it does happen and once the picture is taken the image is restored back to a normal style.
You sometimes see when you look back at pictures you see a blurred image and you suspect the image has turned out bad but when you upload them onto the computer the image seems normal and very good quality so never delete a picture with this camera until the image has been fully explored.

I used this camera in the dark the other night and usually the flash is on auto unless you change it and I could not see my pet in the dark so I took a picture anyways in the hope something might turn out. The result was great and the quality was exceptional. You could see the cat perfectly and it was almost as if I had taken the picture in normal daylight as well.

I think the weight of the product is around 170g and that includes my two AA batteries I needed to use as well. I was provided with a cable a USB one to get the pictures extracted off the camera to a computer also.

In terms of what the camera offers this is one of the best I have used and it was reduced to £70 from over £135 just a few months ago. The quality of pictures are outstanding and when I print them off there is no blur or loss of focus but just great quality and I would highly recommend this camera to anyone.

Also posted on Dooyoo and updated on Ciao