Canon PowerShot A3100 IS

Manual Controls

Program mode lets you set ISO level, white balance, metering mode, and image size. My Color mode is available, which offers a few SLR-style color modes (Vivid, Neutral, Sepia and Black & White), which can be further tweaked for contrast, sharpness and saturation. Exposure compensation is available, and so is manual white balance. You can't directly control aperture or shutter speed, and there's no manual focus capability, but the level of image tone and color control is impressive.
 

Focus

There are three available focus settings: normal, macro and infinity.

ISO

Full-resolution ISO settings range from 80-1600. There's also a Low Light mode that boosts the ISO to 3200 while dropping resolution to 2 megapixels.

White Balance

In addition to the auto setting, there are five white balance presets (daylight, cloudy, tungsten and two fluorescent settings), and you can take a manual white balance reading.When using face detection, the white balance is set for the recognized face.
 

Metering

The A3100 IS offers evaluative, center-weighted and spot metering, and meters for recognized faces in Face Detection autofocus mode.
 

You can't directly set the aperture or shutter speed, but you can tweak the camera's reading using exposure compensation, with a ±2 EV range in 1/3 stop increments.
 

Shutter Speed

The shutter speed range in standard mode is 1/1600 second to 1 second. In Long Shutter mode, the maximum exposure can be stretched to 15 seconds.

Aperture

The maximum f/2.7 aperture is fast for an inexpensive camera, useful for shooting in low light and bumping up shutter speeds when capturing fast action.

Image Stabilization

Canon provides optical image stabilization to combat camera shake.

Picture Quality & Size Options

There are six file size settings: Large (4000 x 3000), Widescreen (4000 x 2248) Medium 1 (3264 x 2448), Medium 2 (2592 x 1944), Medium 3 (1600 x 1200) and Small (640 x 480). There's also a Low Light scene mode with 1600 x 1200 resolution.
 

RAW file shooting isn't available.
 

Picture Effects

Canon includes a fairly sophisticated image control system in its point-and-shoot My Colors feature. You can shoot with My Colors off, or select Vivid, Neutral, Sepia or Black & White. You can even customize the levels of contrast, sharpness and saturation for each mode. All in all, it's a useful type of hands-on control.