Canon PowerShot A580 review

The Canon PowerShot A580 is a friendly 8-megapixel point-and-shoot camera. It has a £100 price tag, cheerful styling and runs off AA batteries: all of which make it a family or novice-friendly digital snapper. But beneath the cuddly exterior, is there a camera that deserves to be taken seriously?

Design
The blocky PowerShots are at the far extreme of design when compared to the sleek, glossy IXUS range. The cute design and plastic body gives the chunky A580 a toy-like appearance, but we're not keen on it. The rounded buttons and exaggerated curves have a hint of cheapness and we wonder who will find the design appealing. The frame has no flex or creakiness despite the plasticky feel, so it's sturdy.

The bubbly, rounded buttons and large labels add to the cutesy, non-threatening feel of this friendly snapper

Bulbous, clearly-labelled buttons control the camera with a Func button to provide quick access to shooting options. The mode dial, which offers common scene modes and manual or automatic settings, makes an initially satisfying, later annoying clicking noise when turned, but at least it goes around 360 degrees in both directions.

The 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen is joined by a dinky round optical viewfinder, which lets you switch off the screen to preserve battery life. The viewfinder chops a strip of the sides and bottom off the frame -- known as parallax error -- so you should be careful when composing shots.

One subjective concern that some may not even notice was that the zoom rocker -- a collar switch on the camera's shoulder -- was at a very slight angle that made it less comfortable to use.

Features
The A580's specs and feature set are as vanilla as its styling. The imaging is handled by a relatively small 1/2.5-inch CCD sensor. The lens has a 35mm-equivalent focal length of 35-140mm, which isn't especially wide, but is a slightly longer than usual 4x optical zoom. Image stabilisation is built in to the lens and orientation sensor works out which way round the picture was taken.

Additionally, a 9-point TTL autofocus also uses face detection to focus on and set exposure for faces spotted in the frame. You can also select a face and track it as they move around. There are 16 shooting modes including automatic mode with options like portrait and landscape on the mode dial and less commonly-used options like beach and foliage in the menus. One impressive feature is a 15-second long shutter, which can be used to create interesting night shots.