As easy or as powerful as you'd like it to be

The Canon A75 refines a proven design with a few worthwhile touchups and some great new features.

Last year's award winning Canon A70 was a delight to use; however, there were a few less than user friendly traits. As a camera powered by AA batteries or rechargeable NiMH AA's it digested power cells at an alarming rate. The ergonomic of some of the controls were less than practical. It also had an arduously difficult to find Auto Exposure control.

Canon determined what was less that perfect and rectified these issues while upgrading the camera with some cool new features.

Power consumption has been drastically reduced with Canon's upgraded LCD screen. The D!GIC processor reduces the amount of batteries this camera consumes in comparison with other brands - Canon has gone one step further by front lighting the LCD with two small white LEDs. This greatly extends your battery life - however you may see a small dark inverted V at the bottom of the LCD. This V is simply the darkest area between the light paths of the LEDs - all A75's display this aberration. Not a big deal, but it may wig some people out. The LCD is quite a bit larger than that of the A75 so I found the darkened area to be of little or no distraction.

The old "Picture/Review" Switch has been swapped out for an A80 style switch. I believe this switch will be a little hardier in comparison to the switch on the A70 (a small malfunction, but a $105 repair Canadian when it goes...). It also fits most thumbs nicely. The new layout of the controls is more intuitive. Two thumbs up for these changes!

The familiar Canon dial at the top of the camera has added an Auto Exposure control for scene specific shooting. Canon has compiled a library of thousands of image profiles and distilled them into a very concise set of instructions for their D!GIC processor. So far it has made using the camera in less than optimal settings a breeze.

If you're unfamiliar with the Canon A series cameras it may be of benefit to say that they are the most powerful cameras in their class, however, even if you'll never use the manual functions it's still one of the wisest purchases you can make. Canon's creative modes - Portrait, Landscape, Night Shot, Scene Select, Slomo and Stitch Assist are all excellent features. It is possible to compose brilliant custom shots with very little knowledge of photography other than "Where am I shooting?" and "Does that look good?”

The camera does also feature a macro and a movie mode. Macro mode yielded very balanced pictures with sharp detail and accurate colour. The movie mode is a typical movie mode for a digital camera at 15 fps; however the Canon seems MUCH smoother than a similar Sony I tested which purported to display 24 frames per second.

The camera comes with a set of AA batteries (replace these with rechargeable post haste!), a wrist strap (USE IT!), a 32MB high speed Compact Flash Memory card (I bought a high speed 256 MB card), and the software and manuals.

The software is very easy to load and use. The Canon Zoom Browser makes it very easy to navigate your shots without an elaborate filing system.

Pictures from the Canon were of an extremely high quality. Colours are accurate and vibrant, detail is fine and lighting is good. Canon has a variety of flash and indoor shooting options which tend to bring out the best in indoor photography. A little image balancing is occasionally required on flash shots where the subject was too close to the camera - this is a standard difficulty for any digital camera; the Canon tends to have fewer issues with this than other brands.

All in all I'm very satisfied with my purchase and I give this camera two thumbs way up. Great power management, sharp images, excellent ergonomics make this camera a smart buy.