Canon PowerShot A700 Digital Camera

I take pictures for both personal and professional use, and struggle with the need for portability versus taking the best possible pictures. The photos that I take professionally are published in magazines and are usually snapshots of people interacting with each other and touching various pieces of equipment. This doesn't require the absolute highest quality but I still like the photos to be the best they can be, if only to stay on the good side of the magazines' editors.

So began my search for a smaller camera that takes great pictures. I decided on the Canon PowerShot A700, as it has a 6x zoom lens, six-megapixel resolution and an optical viewfinder. Why did the camera need to have an optical viewfinder? I'm convinced that I take more stable -- and therefore sharper -- pictures when I use an optical viewfinder instead of the LCD viewfinder. However, I've been using digital cameras for many years and also wanted a large LCD screen. The A700 fills that need with a 2.5-inch LCD screen.

I paid $350 for the Canon PowerShot A700 and bought it within the first couple of days that it was available. I have now taken many thousands of pictures with the camera, perhaps more than 10,000.

What It Is

I've already discussed some of the features of the A700 but it has many more. Here are some of the features that are most important to me:

6x optical zoom lens: For a small camera, the A700 has a nice lens with excellent optical range. I'm very pleased with the performance of this lens except at maximum zoom, where the focus is a little soft. Otherwise, the lens is clean and sharp, with minimal lens artifacts.

Compact size: The A700 is not the smallest camera out there but it is small enough to easily fit in a jacket pocket. In fact, I routinely keep it in my pants pocket, although it is a little bulky for that. However, I've gotten a lot of great shots because the A700 will fit in my pants pocket.

Six-megapixel resolution: The maximum resolution setting on the A700 is 2816 x 2112 pixels, which is high enough to print a photo more than nine inches wide in a magazine. With the camera set for its highest resolution and image quality, I get approximately 465 photos on a 1 GB memory card.

SD Memory: The A700 uses Secure Digital (SD) memory cards, which are inexpensive and widely available.

2.5-Inch LCD screen: The LCD screen on the A700 is big and easy to view in all but the brightest conditions. The lens zoom control is used to zoom in on portions of the image, which is great to see if someone had his/her eyes closed. Menus are easy to read and set on the big LCD screen.

Optical viewfinder: Many small cameras do not have an optical viewfinder, forcing you to use the LCD screen. This means that you must hold the camera some distance from your face, which is inherently less stable than holding the camera against your face. Less stable means fuzzier shots. The Canon A700 has an optical viewfinder, so I use it to take sharper pictures. Unfortunately, the image actually seen by the camera is a good bit bigger than the image seen in the optical viewfinder, so I have to compensate for that. My compensation doesn't always work but I still like having an optical viewfinder.

Small and lightweight: The A700 is small enough to comfortably fit in a jacket pocket and as I said earlier, it even fits in my pants pocket. With two AA batteries loaded, it weighs around eight ounces, which is very lightweight.

Battery life: The A700 uses two commonly available AA batteries. I use 2100 mA rechargeables, which typically last for at least 350 shots. I have been very impressed with this camera's battery life. I consider it nothing less than astonishing that I get nearly 400 pictures from two AA batteries, and I use the LCD screen and flash frequently.

Video mode: The A700 takes decent videos and saves them as AVI files, which are easy to edit in most computer editing systems. The biggest drawback to the A700's video capability is that the image quality degrades quickly if I zoom in more than a little bit. I'm not sure why this is but I've now made several videos with this camera and have learned to use the zoom very carefully.

How It Works

The Canon PowerShot A700 is ready to roll in about one second after turning it on -- very fast. If you need to use the flash, that will take another five seconds or so to charge. Keep that in mind if you need to take several flash pictures back-to-back, as each will require several seconds for the flash to recharge. It takes this long because the camera has only two AA batteries and a slow flash is one of the prices you pay for that convenience.

The zoom control is right at the tip of my right index finger and is easy to use. Once the zoom is set, I hold the shutter button down halfway to have the camera set the exposure and then depress it all the way to take the picture. If I'm not using the flash, I can take pictures quickly. As I said before, there is about a five-second pause between flash pictures. The A700 does not have the ability to work with an external flash. After taking the picture, the shot pops up on the LCD screen for two seconds, an interval that is adjustable by a menu selection.

The competent manual describes the A700's 20 shooting modes. Of these, I use only four: full automatic, portrait, program and video. I use full automatic most of the time but it has a big drawback: The full automatic setting will not allow me to force the flash and I like to use the flash to fill shadows and put sparkle in eyes. The simplest way to force the flash on is to twist the mode dial to the portrait setting and use the navigation control on the back panel to force on the flash. I'll have more on the A700's flash in a moment.

The full-automatic mode decides if the camera needs to use a flash or not. It will allow me to turn the flash off but will not allow me to force it on. Otherwise, the full-auto mode focuses and sets the exposure, and it does a good job. Sometimes the exposure needs tweaking and that's why I use the program mode. With the mode dial selected to "P" (for "Program") and the LCD screen switched on, I use the navigation control to adjust the exposure. This was critical for shots of snowy mountains and glaciers that I took in Alaska in August 2006. The A700's auto settings made for dark, underexposed pictures and I was only able to get the correct exposure by using the Program mode. In this mode, the camera can be adjusted from -2 to +2 in steps of 1/3. When I process the photos in Photoshop, I have to brighten and darken the images far less than I used to with other cameras, which is a good indication that the A700 is getting the exposure right on its own.

The Canon PowerShot A700 has an excellent macro mode that lets me get tight closeups of small subjects. For example, I took this camera to Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, MD, last month and got excellent pictures of butterflies at the park's live butterfly exhibit. The camera does a similarly fine job with shots of flowers, plants and technical items. I use the macro setting frequently.

This Canon camera focuses better than any other autofocus camera I've used. I now have four digital cameras and the Canon is consistently the best focuser of the lot. I used to throw away one in 10 shots from one of my cameras as being poorly focused. The Canon A700 is more like one in 50 or one in 100. I actually have confidence in this camera's autofocus. (It is possible to manually focus but I've not tried it.) There are a couple of different selections for autofocus and I use the one that forces the camera to focus on the object in the center of the image. One feature I wish this camera had was the ability to fix the focus for a specific distance. For example, it would be great to set the camera to be focused at 1, 3 or 10 meters. This way, I could take a shot through a screen and have the camera focus on the subject and not the screen. However, the A700 does not have fixed-focus capability.

The camera does have a nicely powerful flash that adjusts itself for the light requirements. I can get decently exposed shots from 10 feet away from the subject and I can also get the right exposure with the flash only two feet away. Not only that, but the flash mixes beautifully with daylight so that it works great to light someone's face who has his/her back to the sun. I use the flash way more often than most people and I'm consistently pleased at how well the A700's flash works. It would be better still if it cycled between flashes a little faster but that's the price I pay for its small size and light weight. (It has only two AA batteries, after all.)

Color rendition and sharpness from the A700 are excellent. It consistently takes shots that have natural color and are crisply detailed. The one drawback in image quality is noise -- I'm disappointed with the noise in pictures from this camera. It is really far noisier than I expected it to be and it is the camera's biggest image flaw in my opinion. The images are still usable and I have had many published in magazines. However, the noise from the A700 is much higher than the noise in similar scenes from my other cameras. (My other cameras are MUCH more expensive than the A700 but I'm not looking for that level of quality. However, two or three dB less noise would make this an excellent camera instead of merely a good one.)

The A700 is an easy camera to handle. The controls fall naturally to hand and things are where I expect them to be. In addition, the 2.5-inch screen is a beauty and it makes reviewing shots a real pleasure. I took nearly 200 photos during a business outing one day and was reviewing them on the bus ride home afterward. A couple of my co-workers saw me and I quickly gathered a crowd looking over my shoulder at the big, bright screen. It was easily big enough for four or five people to see the image. Several other people had digital cameras but their cameras all had postage-stamp sized displays. The Canon A700's LCD screen looks like an HDTV in comparison. I will never go back to a camera with a smaller display.

Here are two links to pictures that I've taken with the Canon PowerShot A700. One is Mt. McKinley in Alaska (also known as Denali), taken in August 2006. The other is a shot from the IDX booth at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, taken in April 2006. A higher-resolution version of this photo was published in the May 31, 2006 issue of TV Technology magazine. In fact, it made the cover, used as part of a collage that included other shots I took with the A700.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c393/pvreditor/IDXMartin-Calmusreduced.jpg
http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c393/pvreditor/Denali6reduced.jpg

Summary

I like the Canon A700. It is a good camera that falls a little short of being an excellent camera for just one reason: image noise. The level of noise from the A700 is perfectly acceptable for casual snapshots and family vacations, but it begins to limit the camera's use for more serious photography.

On the other hand, I'm crazy about its small size and 6x lens, both of which give me opportunities to get shots that I would not otherwise get. In fact, a professional photographer with a big Nikon digital SLR saw me whip out the A700 and get quick shots so often that he told me that he was envious. It took him a minute to get his camera out and prepared, by which time I'd taken five or six shots with different framings and zooms.

I'm also impressed with the flash on the A700. It does an excellent job filling shadows and lighting the subject. The big LCD screen will make you the hit of any party, as people crowd around to see your pictures.

Finally, the A700 is simply easy to use. It is a no-brainer if you just leave it in the automatic mode, but there is so much more available if you dig into it just a little.

All in all, the A700 is a terrific little camera that gets knocked back a little because of its moderate level of digital noise. Canon makes a big deal about the enhanced processing in this camera but the noise level takes what could be a home run and turns it into a double. It's still a good result but Canon just didn't hit it out of the park on this one.

I give the Canon PowerShot A700 between 3.5 and four stars, rounding up to four.