Canon PowerShot A70 > Reviews (34)

If you are serious about photography and want a pocket camera, then the A70 is definetely worth a look. Almost unique in this price bracket, it offers true manual settings, and even manual focus. That means that you can frame complicated shots (with very dark areas and very bright ones in different parts of the frame) and set your own exposure to capture the details in the parts of the image you are interested in (most meters will privilege what they see in the middle of the frame).
With 4 and 5 megapixel cameras proliferating, some may baulk at a camera with "only" 3.2. The extra megapixels only useful if you plan to do two things - print very large images (3 MP is more than enough for A4) or crop (enlarge a portion of the image). Of course rather than enlarge, you could just move closer before taking the picture.
If you plan to buy a digital SLR, or take a lot of pictures, then Compact Flash is a welcome feature - its the standard on high-end cameras, and is cheaper per megabyte than competing formats.
Another welcome feature for serious photographers is the use of AA batteries - Lithiumions may pack a punch, but if you run out of juice, you're stuck. A set of AA Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) rechargeables costs £10 (for high capacity 2000 mAh) - enough to keep you shooting all day. With a spare set, you never need worry that you'll miss a shot because your batteries gave up.
Like many compact cameras, the A70 takes a while to power up - if you suddenly spot the shot of a lifetime, those few seconds it takes the electronics to wake up and the lens to extend fully can seem like a lifetime. Having said that, almost all cameras of this type (with variable zooms) suffer from this problem - and the A70's startup times are not vastly different from any of its competitors.
You can however get round one of the other drawbacks of small amateur cameras - autofocus lag - by turning autofocus off. That doesn't have to mean going home with blurry pictures though - because the camera has full manual controls, shutter and aperture priority exposure. By setting a small aperture (high f-stop number) you can give your pictures high depth of field. That means that objects close to the lens and objects far away - like the horizon - will be in focus - and the autofocus become redundant.
The problem comes when you want the reverse - a portrait with the subject in focus but the background blurred. The smaller a camera's CCD (that's the bit the picture is focused on - where film would be) the greater the depth of field. That means that with a small chip (such as the ones found in cheap, amateur cameras), it will be very hard to de-focus the background, even when you open up the aperture fully. Despite the A70s reasonably bright lens (2.8 at full wide-angle, 4.8 when fully zoomed in) you will find your shots producing much more depth of field than a 35mm film camera would.
Amother high-end feature on this budget camera is the availability of additional lenses. For £ 15, Canon sell you an adapter, that fits around the lens, which has a 52mm thread on it.

You can then add teleconverters (that magnify the image) or wideangle converters (which shrink it). This will enable you to achieve something approaching a 28mm equivalent lens - good for architecture and dramatic shots. Macro lenses are also available, but the standard lens has a good macro function, allowing very close focus (good for coins insects etc). Adding a teleconverter can help in taking portraits (longer focal lengths help to blur the background) but bear in mind that the CCD size will limit this somewhat.
The camera's software is better than the average, with a clean, intuitive interface that allows you to download and file your photographs. One plus is that it understands and displays more data from each picture than third party software (the EXIF data) - so even if you already have a favourite image capture programme, your better off sticking to the supplied Canon software for downloading, so you read all the Canon-specific EXIF tags correctly.

One feature that would have been nice is the option to shoot in RAW format. RAW means the raw data capture by the camera - because its uncompressed, it can take up a lot of memory, but it has the advantage that it retains more information than a JPEG. That means that if you have over or underexposed, you may still be able to tease detail out of the RAW image.
One fault (also common to many amateur cameras) is that the optical viewfinder only covers a portion of the image. That means that when you look through it, small details that are on the edge of the frame will not be visible, buy will be in the captured image (which will have a wider field of view than you expect, making your subjects smaller than predicted). Of course you can check the display, but that consumes batteries, and many photographers prefer using a viewfinder.
All round, a well-featured camera that's easy enough for a beginner to use, but with extra controls that will satisfy a dedicated amateur.