Canon Powershot A570

The PowerShot A series of digital cameras from Canon have always delivered excellent blends of capabilities and performance at reasonable prices. With the A570 IS, Canon has included an image stabilizer, face detection and even ISO1600 sensitivity to its lengthy list of features.
The PowerShot A series of digital cameras from Canon have always delivered excellent blends of capabilities and performance at reasonable prices. With the A570 IS, Canon has included an image stabilizer, face detection and even ISO1600 sensitivity to its lengthy list of features.


Features: The 7.1-megapixel A570 IS has a lot more to offer than other mainstream digital cameras. It’s packed with features that will please both beginners and amateur photographers. With modes including Progam, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual, you have complete control over exposure parameters. If you aren’t familiar with exposure and white balance settings, you can use the built-in modes and presets depending on the scene.
The camera has 13 shooting modes including Portrait, Landscape, Indoor and Video capture. With 4x optical zoom coupled with an image stabilizer, you can capture distant objects without any blur. Canon has also added Face Detection to the Digic III processor to keep faces in focus in portraits and group photos.

Design and ergonomics: The all-silver A570 IS sports a retro look with a boxy design and a 2.5-inch LCD in addition to the optical viewfinder. Weighing around 235 grams with two AA batteries and an SD card installed, it balances well when held to shoot. Like its counterparts from the A series, this one too has a good grip. With the fingers hugging the battery compartment, you can use your index finger for the shutter button or the zoom lever. The thumb can be used to comfortably navigate the mode dial or the control panel on the rear. The controls panel features a layout similar to other A series digicams with the menu, function and directional buttons arranged neatly to the right of the LCD display. The user interface is very intuitive without complex menu hierarchies. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for even a first-timer to master the functions.

Performance: We put the A570 IS to test by taking a couple of indoor and outdoor shots. In addition to the automatic mode, we used the shutter priority, aperture priority and manual modes at various ISO speeds and zoom levels to evaluate its faithfulness in color reproduction, contrast and image detail. Like all of the other Canon digital cameras we have tested so far, this one too excels in color reproduction and sharpness.The level of detail captured was quite commendable, and noise levels were low in well-lit scenes. However with the ISO set to maximum, the images captured were too noisy. In the outdoor tests, there was negligible purple fringing around edges of bright objects. The overall performance of the camera is excellent except for the time taken to write images to the memory card. You have to wait for six seconds until you can zoom into a picture you’ve just shot.