Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Canon has an excellent rep with its digital cameras and the A710 is one of the latest in that long line. It's a great camera...not too small to handle with but small enough to be slipped into a jacket pocket. The zoom works well and the stabilization keeps zoomed photos clear, although a bit grainy at full zoom. Syncing with the computer couldn't be easier...load the included software and you're ready to go. I couldn't believe how easy it was to do this. As stated by another reviewer, the included 16mb card is almost worthless, but I used it to practice and get the hang of the camera operation before loading up a 1 gb card. I took the camera on a week and a half vacation and loved it. At the touch of a button I can see how many shots I have left on the card and how many I'll have if I adjust the size and detail of the photos. This let me reduce photo quality just a bit to get the last few photos at the end of the vacation onto the card. Zoom is quick, but, as stated in another review, the flash recharge takes a few seconds. The large LCD screen is great, but, like most digitals, difficult to see in bright light. This makes the optical viewfinder a god-send, but be aware that the viewfinder shows you a tighter shot that what is really being captured in the photo(watch out for the trend from other camera manufacturers of dropping the optical viewfinder!). There are a multitude of optional settings that I'm still figuring out. One - the night shot setting - is questionable. I get better night time shots with the setting on 'automatic' that I do using the 'night shot' setting. My only problem with the A710 is battery life. Even with the power save function on, I went through a set of batteries a day. Obviously, using the flash a lot reduces battery life and I took many photos inside buildings. I also took 50-60 photos a day, so I was working the batteries from sun-up to sun-down and sometimes after that (I took 600+ photos in 10 days of travel). Rechargables are probably a good idea, but traveling in Europe complicates that....you need to carry a Euro style plug in addition to the battery charging apparatus and lugging all that would be just about as bad as dragging around my big, old Pentax film SLR (the main point, for me, of going digital was to reduce the size and weight of taking the film camera on an extended vacation). The need for all the batteries is the only reason I don't give the A710 5 stars and that's probably not really fair considering the number of photos I'm taking and the conditions of flash use. In conclusion - The A710 takes great photos, is easy to use, figure out, and connect to your computer, has all the features a non-professional photog could want has the megapixels to let you enlarge your photos to at least 8x10 and is reasonably priced. If you can live with replacing batteries frequently in heavy-use situations, I doubt you can do better in this price range than this camera.