Customer Reviews

Canon PowerShot A530 5MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom

5 star:		(120)
4 star:		(67)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

The Canon A530 is an amazing camera for the price or anyone on a slightly tighter budget. The first thing that surprised me about it was how small it was; at only 3.5 inches wide and 2.5 inches high, it fits easily into your pocket, and serves well as a travel companion.

Pros:
- Amazing image quality for a camera in this price range
- Excellent clarity in macro mode
- ISO 800 is useful to have when taking night shots without a tripod or flash
- My colors settings are useful and surprisingly intricate; you can set a custom setting for levels in red, green, and blue individually, as well as contrast, sharpness, saturation, and skin tone
- Color accent and swap are nice features for the creative type, and are often more accurate than I had expected
- Stitch assist mode automatically locks exposure compensation and aperture to make panoramas easier and consistent (I would really recommend a tripod when doing this to keep the camera level, though. Stitch assist software isn't perfect)
- Widescreen 16:9 framing is a nice feature (not to be confused with true widescreen, but automatically frames and crops in 16:9 ratio)
- 4x optical zoom works very well
- Extremely fast start-up time (about one second)
- Excellent auto-focus features
- Amazing battery-life (a pair of Energizer lithiums lasted me about 800 shots with LCD)

Cons:
- Only two aperture settings per zoom level in manual mode. ex. f/2.6 and f/5.6 at 1x, but nothing in-between (the A540 has in-between values for each zoom)
- Would have been nice to have had a flip-out LCD like the A610
- No Aperture or Shutter Speed priority modes (the A540 does have them)
- LCD screen extremely hard to see in very bright conditions (although to be fair, this seems like a more common issue among digital cameras)

All in all, the Canon A530 is an excellent choice for the price, and might be the best bang for your buck if you're looking for something with more features than your standard point-and-shoot, along with excellent image quality.

I don't want to trash the reviewer from Florida, but reading the manual will take care of all of your problems. The flower icon is for the Macro setting. There's an easy-to-read chart of icons in the manual and if you can't figure out the icon from a chart that shows all of the icons it's no wonder that you found an actual written manual too complex. The macro produces crisp pictures with excellent color.
I also use this to take pictures for eBay and it works wonderfully and needs no additional lighting. I have a simple 200watt soft light and the flash doesn't go off when I shoot items. Turning off the flash is even easier - it's just one button to push and I can't fathom why anyone can't figure that out.
The ISO 800 setting is much better than on the previous PowerShots, but still isn't perfect. However, this is a point-and-shoot camera and is adaquate for almost all needs if you remember that. I shot some wonderful pictures in a dark concert hall and got excellent clarity on about 80% of the pictures - the rest had some slight blurring.
I enjoyed the various settings, especially the stitching, and found them all easy to use and useful. The videos are of pretty decent quality as well, though it's not a video camera.
For the price, this is an excellent camera for everyday use and special occasions.

Before purchased the Cannon A530, I compared it with several other 5MP cameras.(Kodak, Sony, Nikon, Polaroid, HP, Vivitar). I chose the A530 for several reasons: 1- The number of shooting modes (over 17), 2- It uses two inexpensive AA batteries rather that more expensive Lithium, or other specialty batteries, 3- The new ISO 800 setting which reduces camera shake, 4- The White Balance Control (Auto, preset for Cloudy, Tungsten, & Flourescent, and the 4X Optical zoom lens, and 5- The Post Card Size and the Date Imprint.

I takes excellent clear pictures. The color is very true. The exposure is right on. I have tried editing a few photos, and cannot make them any better by editing brightness, contrast,saturation,and color.

Although it has an optical viewfinder, the LCD is bright and clear even in sunlight for composing a shot.

It is on the verge of being too bulky, but Cannon has other smaller models with similar features (at a higher price). I am very happy with this camera and haven't wished I had chosen a different camera.

I thought this Canon deserved more than an average of 3.5 stars, so I'm adding my comments.

I bought the A530 for my daughter when it became available on Amazon. She had taken photos, with her three-year-old Sony 5MP, of her roses in macro mode. Most of the photos were out of focus. The Sony just seemed to have trouble focusing on the right subject in macro mode. I have found that Canon cameras take excellent photos, especially in macro mode, and the A530 has not disappointed. She (and I) have taken many sharply focused photos of flowers, up close.

LIKES: Very good quality, features, and price. Sharp and colorful photos. Easy to use, small and lightweight. Improved over the A520 with 5MP instead of 4MP and MUCH faster performance.

DISLIKES: Canon's decrease of LCD pixel resolution per inch on the lastest models - A430, A530, A540. A disappointment, but only a small annoyance.

ADDED NOTE: Daylight photos are always better over indoor flash shots, whenever possible, with any camera.

We got this camera about 3 weeks back and it has delivered beautiful pictures ourdoors and decent ones indoors. The start up is fast and this is particularly helpful to me since I use it extensively to shoot pictures of our toddler who is always on the move and decides to do something new and interesting without a warning. With my old Samsung digital camera I missed capturing a lot of moments due to the slow startup. Also, in my old camera there was a lag between the flash coming on and the actual clicking. My daughter would invariably close her eyes after the flash and all her pictures came out with her eyes closed. Not the case with the A530. The color accent feature is very addictive. It does not gobble up batteries like many other cameras do and the video quality is good too. On the whole I would definitely recommend this camera. It is a steal for the price.

I've had this camera for about 2 weeks. It's definately the best digital camera I have ever owned.

Pros: Small, compact size, yet not so small that its hard to hold; 4x optical zoom is very effective; takes 2 AA instead of the 4 AA I'm used to - this is a good thing as long as the camera lasts a while on the two batteries; many shooting modes available, and they work well; manual shooting controls available if you need them (though I will probably not use this, the shooting modes are what I use); video mode shoots VGA (640x480 - full DVD quality) as well as a compressed mode which generates file sizes suitable for e-mail.

Cons: the only con I've found so far is the SD card slot is in the same compartment as the batteries, and since the batteries are spring-loaded, it makes it a little annoying to open the battery/SD card door every time you want to get the card out to download images/video to your computer. To solve this, I've just been using the USB cable that came with the camera to download, this way the card can stay in the camera. The only drawback to this is the camera must be turned on in order to access the images/video, but it's a minor problem.

Overall, this camera is excellent. You get a whole lot for the money you pay. I would definately recommend purchasing a 1 GB card; the camera only comes with a 16 MB card, which you will fill up with 20 seconds of VGA video.

I have had the camera about 4 months.
It is now in for repair for the second time with the e18 error.
This error stops the lens from going in and out correctly.

When the camera works it works fine and is easy to use, but for me the camera has been in 1/3 of the time I owned it.

I had a A520 before updating and it also broke.
I have had cameras for years and never had a repair until these 2.

I am very nervous about the powershot series now.

This is the fourth digital camera I've purchased in the last five years (a point-shoot and DSLR for myself, and two point-shoots as gifts for others).

If you were spending nearly $400 for 3 megapixel cameras in 2001, it's amazing to see what's available for half that price today.

This was purchased for my mom, who is well into her 70s, and has been selling on Ebay for a few years. Her product pictures on a very low end camera she bought a few years ago really needed some help.

This camera is fairly intuitive, and worked well out of the box.

No strong negatives, but prepare for the following:

Some of the the menus are complex and options I would consider commonly used (like photo resolution) are rather deeply buried.

The memory card and batteries are located within the same access door on the bottom of the camera. This seems like a good way to end up picking up batteries.

The bundled software is only OK. You can get a better organizer for free (Google's Picasa) and the editing software is nothing to get excited about.

The flash options are limited to "auto flash" and "no flash". I was surprised not to find a "manual flash" to force flash operation (this may be one of the deeply buried options).

It has lots of "scenario" presets (kids and pets, landscape, etc), but none of these seemed to offer any improvement over full auto. Inexplicably, the "nightscape" setting doesn't turn of the flash.

If your needs are simple (and if you are already running an organizer like Picasa or the one in Photoshop Elements v5) then this camera should be more than adequate.

I thought this Canon deserved more than an average of 3.5 stars, so I'm adding my comments.

I bought the A530 for my daughter when it became available on Amazon. She had taken photos, with her three-year-old Sony 5MP, of her roses in macro mode. Most of the photos were out of focus. The Sony just seemed to have trouble focusing on the right subject in macro mode. I have found that Canon cameras take excellent photos, especially in macro mode, and the A530 has not disappointed. She (and I) have taken many sharply focused photos of flowers, up close.

LIKES: Very good quality, features, and price. Sharp and colorful photos. Easy to use, small and lightweight. Improved over the A520 with 5MP instead of 4MP and MUCH faster performance.

DISLIKES: Canon's decrease of LCD pixel resolution per inch on the lastest models - A430, A530, A540. A disappointment, but only a small annoyance.

ADDED NOTE: Daylight photos are always better over indoor flash shots, whenever possible, with any camera.

I bought this camera to supplement my DSLR. DSLR's are great but I have neither the need nor the desire to lug mine around to parties and such. Anyway, here's what I think about this one:

Pros:

Small, lightweight
Takes AA's, and only two
Fast start-up and operation
Fully manual mode, useful P mode
ISO up to 800
Great picture quality
Great menu system
Lots of options
Can't beat the price

Cons:

Spotty auto-focus (can tend to hunt quite a bit indoors)
Flash recycle time slow (because of only two AA's, but it's not that big of a deal)
Occasional lens flare inside with flash

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Overall though, if you're looking for a cheap camera, I think this one is tough to beat. 5 MPs give you quite a bit of detail; if you think you need more than that, think twice, because you probably don't. Excellent picture quality from this camera and it has a great feature set, especially for its price. If you want something smaller or a little fancier try the Canon SD series; however, be prepared to spend more. At this price range, this is an obvious winner.