Canon PowerShot A470 (red)

Do you need to get a pretty good digital camera but unexpensive price ? The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples. With a price tag less than $150, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn’t the prettiest camera available and it doesn’t have any flashy features, but for the price, it’s hard to beat.

Canon tries to serve the A470 a much-needed injection of style by offering four color choices: gray, blue, red, and orange. Sadly, colorful accents can’t hide the camera’s chunky, unattractive design. It feels like a king-size candy bar, measuring almost 4 inches long, 2 inches thick, and more than an inch and a half wide. At 7.6 ounces with an SD card and two AA batteries, it also weighs in as one of the heftiest budget cameras available. The lens and LCD screen both jut out uselessly from the body, giving it a bumpy, uneven feel. Compared with the huge selection of budget point-and-shoots on the market measuring just an inch thick or less, the A470 is downright huge. On the bright side, the camera’s large body makes it easy to grip and hold, and its wide design leaves room for large, simple controls that even bigger thumbs can comfortably manipulate.

Noise mars the A470’s otherwise very nice pictures. Grain starts to appear at ISO 200, and becomes quite noticeable at ISO 400. From ISO 800 to the camera’s maximum sensitivity of ISO 1,600, fuzz saturates the picture, giving everything a felt-like texture. Besides the noise, however, the camera’s pictures look good. Fine details appear crisp and clear, especially for a sub-$150 camera. Minor barrel distortion appears on the edges of pictures at the widest lens position, but it doesn’t seriously hurt picture quality. Colors look generally neutral, though they sometimes appear slightly cooler than usual. If you keep sensitivity low, the A470 will produce good-looking prints. Even at higher ISO settings, pictures look clear enough to e-mail or post to the Web.

The Canon PowerShot A470 is a great digital camera. The chunky, sub-$150 shooter doesn’t have many bells or whistles, but it shoots quickly in brighter light and produces very nice-looking pictures. It doesn’t work very well in low light, but that’s a flaw shared by most snapshot cameras in general. If you want to spend as little cash as possible for a decent camera, the PowerShot A470 is one of the best choices currently available.