The Canon Powershot A700, the new flagship of Canon's A-series, boasts an extensive feature set in a surprisingly compact size.  Having a 6 megapixel sensor, a 6X optical zoom lens and full-manual controls, it delivers quality images with relatively low noise and great sharpness throughout its zoom range. The A700 is quite speedy in several important areas like focus-speed, shutter-lag and continuous drive. It main downsides are some automatic white-balance problems, display lag in continuous drive mode and slow flash-recycling. Overall, this camera is an excellent choice for a compact camera.  As for the competition, the Fuji Finepix E900 delivers better image quality but has some trouble with low-light focusing and its manual focus feature is much less worthy. As for the Canon Powershot A620 and A610, they are slightly faster to operate but their images show noticeable more noise. Note that all these cameras have only 4X optical zoom.

 

Read the full Canon Powershot A700 review here.