Content area
Full text
Rick Rizner
The Canon PowerShot A510 won't win any best-of-breed honors, but at $200 this compact camera with good features is an exceptional bargain, so much so that we awarded it a Best Buy in the May 2005 issue.
An upgrade of Canon's PowerShot A75, the 3.2-megapixel A510 is a pleasant example of getting more for less. Its 4X optical zoom (almost unheard of in cameras in this price range) is a very nice step up from the A75's 3X. The A510 also shows that less can be more: It's about a half-inch shorter in width--a reduction Canon accomplished mostly by reducing the battery count from four AAs to two. Not surprisingly, it also cut the battery life by well over half, as the A510 lasted a paltry 130 shots in our test.
Functionally, the two cameras are very similar. A top-mounted mode dial lets you select full-automatic, programmed-auto, aperture- priority, shutter-priority, or full-manual exposure control. You...