Introduction

The Canon Powershot A700 is a full-featured compact camera with a 6 megapixel sensor and an uncommon 6X optical zoom among cameras in its class. Becoming increasingly common among digital cameras, the A700 boasts ISO sensitivities up to 800 at its full 6 megapixel resolution. Other than the longer zoom, its feature set is similar to other Canon A-series cameras with full-manual controls including custom-white balance, manual focusing and image adjustment parameters. Other compact digital cameras offer a similar feature set, but these are the minority. Notable features of the Canon Powershot A700 are:

Suitability - What is it good for?

The A700 should be seen as a general purpose camera. Like every such camera, it has fully-automatic modes which allow its use as a simple point-and-shoot camera. This fairly small compact camera would fit in a large coat pocket, pouch or purse. Its light but durable body feels solid enough to survive such trips but would not survive being dropped. Nevertheless, storing the A700 in a soft pouch is highly recommended not to scratch the LCD, which incidentally acts as a dust magnet.

The A700's manual controls allow for creative photography suitable for various subjects such as landscape, portraits and night-photography. Its 6X optical zoom, equivalent to 35mm-210mm on a 35mm camera, gives some extra framing flexibility for reaching further subjects, but is neither long enough for wildlife photography, nor wide enough for most architectural shots. The A700 also is quite suitable for macro-photography with its 1cm macro mode and manual focus which shows a zoomed portion of the image plus a distance scale.

Wide-Angle @ 35mm

6X Optical Zoom Region Highlighted

Tele-Photo @ 210mm

Indoor shots, and particularly indoor action shots, are truly the realm of DSLR cameras, but as far as a compact camera can go, the A700 does well thanks to its lower-than-average image noise and its short-shutter lag. We will discuss the continuous drive's performance further down in the review, but lets just say for now that it is inadequate for following action.

As expected from a 6 megapixel camera, the A700 can be used to produce nice prints up to 10"x13" but not under every condition. Smaller size prints up to 6"x8" are almost never a problem though. This camera can also be taken to more rudimentary environments thanks to its long battery life (400 shots per charge, CIPA standard) using common AA batteries and its use of low-cost SD memory.

Capability - What can it do?

Beyond its basic automatic, semiautomatic and manual modes, the Canon Powershot A700 has some interestingly useful features, plus its share of useless ones. The ISO setting has 7 positions, which are not always available. There is the Auto-ISO setting, an Auto High-ISO setting, plus 6 settings for ISO speeds from 80 to 800. The Auto-ISO setting chooses and ISO between 80 and 200, while to Auto High-ISO setting can choose ISO up to 800. The latter is very useful when the built-in flash is disabled and a higher shutter-speed may be required to avoid blur from camera shake.

Focusing can be done using Canon's AiAF system which chooses between nine non-overlapping focus zones, using the center of the image or using a Flexizone system. The Flexizone system allows a focus zone to be moved anywhere except near the edges of the image. This zone is then used to establish a focus lock. Regardless of which of these modes are selected, manual-focus or macro focus can be enabled. In manual focus mode, focus is established by sliding a distance scale using the left and right arrows of the 4-way controller. Optionally, the center of the image can be enlarged while focusing manually.

Automatic, preset and custom white balance work in the expected way. The camera also has various color modes including a custom color mode which allows color saturation, contrast, sharpness, red, green, blue and skin-tones to be modified using a 5-point scale. Metering is also selectable between multi-segment, center-weighed and spot. When not in AiAF focus mode, the A700 can either lock its exposure using the focus point or from the center of the image. There are also two features which only became obvious after reading the manuals: AEL and FL. The former is activated by pressing the exposure compensation button while the shutter is pressed halfway, the latter is activated by pressing the down-arrow of the 4-way controller while the shutter is pressed halfway.

The A700 also has 5 drive modes: single frame advance, continuous drive, 10-second timer, 2-second timer and custom-timer. The continuous drive runs roughly at 2 FPS until the memory card is full. The custom-timer allows a between 1 and 10 shots to be fired consecutively from between 0 to 30 seconds. The remaining drive modes behave just as expected.

This camera is equipped with two sets of scene-modes, one on the mode-dial and one in the SCN positions of the mode-dial. Since the A700 has full-manual controls, the only useful scene mode is panorama assist mode. This mode helps to line up as many as 26 images, plus locks exposure and focus. Incomprehensibly, the ISO is locked to Auto in panorama mode! Finally, there is also a movie-mode which can record video at 640x480 at 30 FPS up to 1 GB of file size, which corresponds to a little less than 8 minutes. Other movie resolutions and frame rates are available, but optical zoom can never be used in movie-mode.

Usability - How easy is it to use?

The A700 is a mostly intuitive camera. Without the manual, its easy to figure out how to operate it. Bonus points for previous Canon users who will feel in familiar territory since Canon has not changed its menu system much over the years.

Holding it, the camera feels solid and is easy to hold. The grip is a bit small to feel secure about it, so use the provided wrist-strap. The grip does make it more secure than completely rectangular designs though. Every button feels solid with a noticeable click point. The shutter also has an easy to feel halfway point.

The 2.5" LCD has only 115K pixels which is relatively low for its size, but it was only apparent while reviewing images and zoomed in. Visibility was good both indoor and outdoor with the LCD. In bright light, colors are washed out so you can see your composition but you can't  evaluate exposure. This is not a problem of the A700 only, since all rear LCD displays behave this way. Speaking of the LCD view, it is exposure-priority until very low light levels which is great for judging exposure accuracy before taking the picture. This essential feature of digital cameras makes them WYSIWYG but has been forgotten by some manufacturers.

This camera has an easy to navigate options system, partitioned into 2 sections: the FUNC section and the MENU section. The FUNC section groups commonly used functions: ISO, white-balance, drive-mode, flash-compensation, metering, plus a few rarely used functions: color-mode, compression and image-size. The MENU section gathers other rarely changed options. Exposure compensation has its own button (used for deletion in playback mode), while flash-mode and focus-mode get changed by the 4-way controller.

There are several interesting functions which are neither on the menu system nor labeled on buttons. We already mentioned exposure lock and focus lock. Another one is the extended review and compare feature. After taking a shot, if the preview option is enabled, the picture appears for a few seconds on the display. During that time, the picture can be deleted by pressing the delete button, the preview can be interrupted by pressing the shutter halfway or the preview can be held by pressing the FUNC button. Once the preview is held, the image can be zoomed without switching to playback mode. The playback mode also has a compare function which allows to switch between images while zoomed in. We found this valuable when comparing sequences of images to determine which ones to keep.

Just like most cameras, the A700 also has its share of strangeness. There is the plastic tripod mount which is poorly placed, making the camera difficult to balance on a mini-tripod. Then there is the issue of which setting is shared between modes. ISO for example is shared between P, S and T modes. If you change the ISO while in S, it will be changed to the same value when you do to P, but not when you go to M. It seems that the M mode has its own ISO memory. So does the Auto mode. Luckily any ISO setting other than default is displayed on the LCD. Then there are ISO options that are not present in certain modes. Specifically, you cannot select the ISO in any scene-modes. The useful Auto High-ISO options is only available in P and Auto modes. Another minor issue we had with the ISO is that the camera does not display automatically chosen ISO values, plus it does not store ISO sensitivity information in the normal EXIF tags of JPEG images.

The panorama-assist mode shows an easy to understand guide for lining up images, we were just wondering why the preview is so small in this mode. Surely Canon could have used the entire width of the LCD? Another change for Canon, which is quite common in ultra-compact cameras, is the use of a single door for both memory and batteries. The only reason there is something to complain about here is that there is nothing to hold the batteries in place while changing memory cards.

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