Canon PowerShot A580 review

Red-eye features can pre-fire an orange flash and/or remove red eye automatically as you snap or manually in playback mode. In playback, images can be tagged or more accurately filed into preset categories. You can choose people and scenery categories as well as three user categories. This makes sorting pictures easier and allows for slideshows showing just the pictures you want.

Movie modes include VGA resolution at 20 frames per second, a compressed long play setting and a 30fps option at half VGA resolution. A 4GB SD card holds 49 minutes of VGA footage, 95 minutes on long play and 91 minutes of half-size video. Canon compacts do not include onboard memory, which we don't mind as internal memory is laughably meagre in most cameras, although bundling a paltry 32MB SD card is pretty pointless.

We also felt that, as so often happens on lower-end compacts, the manual mode is misnamed. You don't even get shutter or aperture priority modes.

Performance
Despite the impression the cheery -- and to our eyes, slightly cheap -- styling gives, this is not a bad camera. It's a Canon after all and image quality is unlikely to be the weakest link. Barrel distortion at the wide end is present, but purple fringing is kept well under control.

Our only real concern is that images are soft. The lack of optical image stabilisation means that hand-held snaps -- the A580's bread and butter -- aren't as crisp as they could be. It's worth sharpening images in post-processing, but that's a matter of taste.

The lack of image stabilisation also leads to the A580's quickly resorting to higher sensor sensitivity when the light is anything but perfect. Predictably, images taken at the highest ISO setting of 1,600 were unusable: noise showed up even at ISO 400 and 800.

Turning it on takes less than two seconds and it boasts a respectable 1-second shot-to-shot time. Unlike all too many contemporary compacts, the A580's continuous mode is not limited to three shots. It seemed happy to snap away indefinitely at just over one frame per second, but our gratification at this was tempered by the annoying ticking noise it made and the fact that the supplied batteries were reduced to flashing red status in just over two minutes.

Conclusion
Puppy-dog styling and an anonymous feature set leave the Canon PowerShot A580 feeling short of personality. Cameras from the IXUS or Lumix ranges, such as Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS5, are much sleeker and more innovative, if more expensive. If you're really keen on a chunky snapper and your heart is set on AA batteries, the Kodak EasyShare Z712 IS packs a 12x zoom and twice the panache.

Edited by Shannon Doubleday