Canon PowerShot A710 IS

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Canon supplies their own ZoomBrowser EX software with this camera, which does a creditable job of organizing and editing images. It’s a Windows only program, though: Mac users will have to find their own solution. Also included is the PhotoStitch 3.1 panorama creation software, which runs on both Windows and Mac, and TWAIN  drivers for importing images directly from the camera into Photoshop or similar programs.

Under the rubber cover on the right side of the camera are the power, USB and AV ports. No power adapter is supplied with the A710 IS. The AV cable provides composite video and mono sound outputs for viewing images or watching recorded images on a TV. This output can be switched between the American NTSC standard and the European PAL one.

As well as DPOF and PictBridge support (for flagging images for later printing and connecting directly to a PictBridge printer) the A710 IS can connect to the Canon SELPHY and PIXMA printer ranges. The Selphy CP & ES printers can also print out stills from movie files.

 

The A710 IS uses two AA batteries, which can be either disposable alkaline or NiMH rechargeable types. Canon claims a battery life of 100 shots from a pair of alkaline AAs, and 360 shots from their own NiMH rechargeable ones. We were unable to verify these claims on the show floor however.

 

The Canon PowerShot A710 comes with a 16 MB SD card. The newer SDHC cards are also supported, and these will offer larger capacities than SD Cards: 4GB SDHC cards are already available, and larger ones will be coming soon.

 

Image Stabilization – The A710 IS is the first PowerShot in the A series to offer optical image stabilization, where an element of the lens moves to compensate for small camera movements (such as shaky hands). Other manufacturers have been offering this for some time in their budget models (Panasonic offers it in cameras priced down to $200), but it’s nice to see Canon following suit. We were unable to test this feature in depth, but it did seem to be effective in our tests at the Photokina show.

 

Safety Zoom - The A710 IS has an interesting feature called safety zoom: if you don’t mind losing some resolution, you can increase the length of the zoom lens. It does this by only using the center part of the image sensor, effectively boosting the zoom lens to up to a 24X zoom. But this limits the resolution to the small image size, or 12x with the medium 3 image size.