Teens and seniors - your camera is here

Canon Powershot A410, who would have thought a couple of years ago that you would be able to buy a Canon digital camera for less than $120? Well, you can now, sitting down at the bottom of the A series is the A410 and you get quite a lot of camera for your money. The sensor is a 3.2MP CCD, which produces results that are adequate for a 10x8 print, obviously if you need to crop the image at all, you will lose the quality , but for most well framed and laid out images the quality is adequate.

The lens offers just over a 3x zoom with a 35mm equivalency of 41-131mm giving it a good snap and go range. To keep costs down the A410 uses AA batteries and you should see around 100 shots from a pair of AA’s. Remember though, using the LCD on the back as a viewfinder will severely impact the number of shots you can take. I would recommend a couple of sets of rechargeable with some Duracells for standby.

The A410 is tiny, at approximately 4x2x1.5 and weighing less than 5.5 ounces it is easily pocketable and take anywhere, be careful out in the snow though as it is not rated for operation below 32 degrees. As well as still pictures, it can capture bursts of video up to 3 minutes in up to 640x480/10fps resolution. It packs a lot of features into this compact body, and while it may ‘only’ have 3.2MP it does have all the different shooting modes of many more expensive cameras and all the controls are well laid out and easy to use making it an ideal start for teenagers or for seniors alike giving them as much or as little control over the picture taking as they like. It also has the added benefit of being set up with the instant print button letting you print directly to one of Canon’s PictBridge enabled printers. Canon even offers an external flash to give more than double the range of the internal flash