Canon PowerShot A3100 IS

Auto Mode

Smart Auto mode attempts to match the scene the camera's seeing with one of 18 shootings situations, and adjusts the exposure settings accordingly. The mode that was chosen appears on-screen when you review your shots. Since we were trying the camera at a trade show, lacking in scenic vistas and active sports opportunities, we can't tell how well the system works, but it recognized Macro close-ups and faces just fine. You can't use exposure compensation or change focus modes in Auto mode.
 

There is a second auto mode, called Easy and labeled with a heart on the mode dial, that locks out any user control, with the exception of turning the flash on and off. We're not quite sure why they decided to use the heart icon here. Is it an ironic comment on our lack of control when it comes to matters of the heart? A display of affection towards newbies unfamiliar with manual camera controls? Only Canon's engineers know for sure.
 

Movie Mode

Movie recording is strictly standard definition, in 640 x 480 or 320 x 240 resolution, stored in AVI files with MJPEG compression. There are two compression settings available for shooting at 640 x 480, though saving memory space seems less than mission-critical given current memory card sizes.

Drive/Burst Mode

There is, in fact, a burst (or at least, continuous shooting) mode, which Canon clocks at about 0.8 shots per second. Not wildly speedy, certainly, but you do get the convenience of keeping your finger mashed down on the shutter rather than repeatedly pumping if you want a series of shots.
 

There is also a self-timer, and it's pretty sophisticated. In addition to the standard 2-second an 10-second delays, you can also enter custom settings, with a delay anywhere from 1 to 30 seconds, with 1 to 10 shots taken when the timer expires. This degree of customization is rarely found even on more expensive cameras.
 

Playback Mode

The level of choice and information presentation in playback mode is quite complete. You can see your photo on a clean screen, overlay basic shooting info, or detailed info complete with a histogram. The image can be magnfied up to 10x by pressing the zoom switch in one direction, or displayed as thumbnails (as few as 4, as many as 140) by zooming out repeatedly. The slide show utility lets you decide how long each photo is shown, and whether you want one of two transition effects: nothing special, but it works.
 

If you have the time or inclination (we don't, but you may have more time on your hands) there's an in-depth photo categorization system that lets you tag photos as favorites or sort them into a variety of categories, which can then be used to browse selected images. As for editing, photos can be trimmed, resized or corrected for red-eye problems.
 

Custom Image Presets

Quite a few scene modes are available. The mode dial offers Portrait, Landscape, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets and Indoor, along with a SCN setting to manage the remainder. These include several fairly standard offerings (Beach, Foliage, Snow, Fireworks) plus a few oddballs. Face Detection Self-Timer is included here: as the name implies, the camera waits until a face appears in the frame before snapping a shot. The Low Light mode is actually a renaming of the High ISO mode offered in previous cameras: it bumps the effective ISO up to 3200, but cranks the resolution down to 1600 x 1200. Newly introduced here are Super Vivid and Poster Effect. The former gives color and saturation a stratospheric burst that might be a fun transformation in certain situations. Poster Effect, which tones down the difference between colors to get a kind of flat posterized look, didn't strike us as particularly useful, but your aesthetic sense will be the final arbiter.