I've had higher-end Canon compact point-and-shoot cameras before and have always liked their ease-of-use and picture quality, so when I wanted a cheap camera, I was excited to try out the Canon PowerShot A495. On a purely aesthetic note, having a choice of three colors (red, blue, and silver) is nice.

The smooth edges of the Canon A495 make it sleek and easy to slip into your pocket when you're not using it. For someone who used the camera primarily to take pictures of their little kids, this feature is invaluable because it makes it so easy to take the camera out when you see something you quickly want to capture and just as easy to put it away again when you need to run over to rescue your little one from the top rung of a playground structure.

One drawback of this camera is that the 2 AA batteries it requires does make it a bit larger than other point-and-shoots that use those rectangular rechargeable batteries. Personally, I prefer the rechargeable battery because I hate having to continuously buy new batteries, which is something this camera necessitates. According to the specifications, standard alkaline batteries should be good for 150 pictures, but I found that I burned through them faster than that and I wasn't even using the flash. Obviously, different brands of batteries might give you longer life than others. Nickel-metal hydride batteries give you substantially more battery life.

The 2.5-inch LCD screen makes it pretty easy to view your pictures and videos. The separate playback button is a convenient way to look at pictures, especially when the camera lens is retracted.

The buttons and controls are labeled in a standard fashion and are intuitive to use. This camera uses an SD (or SDHC or SDXC) memory card, which is nice and small and easy to find in stores.

One minor complaint is that the supplied wrist band is non-adjustable, meaning you can't tighten the strap around your wrist. Even though the number of times this camera has never accidentally slipped off my wrist I would still prefer that added security.

***Taking Pictures***

For someone going after a cheap point-and-shoot, they're probably going to spend most of their time using the AUTO setting, which apparently works by choosing the best of 18 predefined shooting scenarios. This is convenient and it results in good pictures, however, there are options for exercising greater control over your picture and for specifying what kind of situation you're in. I'm not a serious photographer, so most of those technical details and controls are not as useful to me, but it's nice to know those choices exist.

This camera has a 3.3X optical zoom and a 4X digital zoom (13X combined zoom). I tend not to use a lot of the zoom capability because I find that the picture quality suffers. Nothing terrible, it's just that I can usually tell at a glance whether a picture was taken using zoom, so I prefer to not use it if I don't have to.

I also tend not to use the flash very frequently, but when I did, it seemed to take the camera a long time to recharge (although, I *just* tested it out and it seemed to be back on its feet in no time).

There are 13 Scene Modes: Portrait, Night, Kids&Pets, Indoor, FaceSelf-Timer, Low Light, Super Vivid, Poster Effect, Beach, Foliage, Snow, Fireworks, and Long Shutter. I've experimented with most of these, but, keeping in mind my non-serious photographer disclaimer, some differences aren't very discernable to me and certain modes just don't seem like things I would use very often.

What DID come in handy, for a single gal driving cross-country solo was the FaceSelf-Timer mode, which allowed me to take pictures of myself with more than 10 seconds to get prepared. The FaceSelf-Timer mode detects faces in the shot and when one more face is added (ostensibly the person setting up the camera), it takes the picture. This feature allows for group shots where everyone is included, without the mad rush-and-dive-in maneuver. This worked perfectly about 95 percent of the time, but sometimes the shutter would go off early (even though I studiously avoided looking at the lens, which is supposed to trigger the final countdown) and sometimes, it felt like it took the camera an eternity to recognize my face (when I was by myself in a desert--not exactly that confusing of a scenario).

You can also shoot video (640 x 380 at 30 frames/second). I didn't use this very often or for very long, but I'm satisfied with the quality of what I did take. According to the specifications, you can take up to 1 hour or 4GB of video. Seems like that should be sufficient for anyone with this camera.

**Conclusion**

For people who want a good affordable camera, I definitely recommend the Canon PowerShot A495.