My|Cyber|Life

Canon Powershot A480 is not one of the most beautiful digital cameras around, being clunky and chuncky, and offering the impression of a low-price camera. At least it’s looking better than the A470, it’s predecessor. The camera has a plastic case, with silver accents. On the top it has the shutter and power buttons, while at the back it has well organized controls, though the materials quality of which the buttons are made doesn’t seem to be very high and are hard to use, especially the zooming one.
It comes in blue, black, red, and silver colors.

Features

It’s 2.5-inch LCD features a low resolution, compared with other cameras of it’s price range. The lens has a 3.3x optical zoom and it’s 37mm wide. Unfortunately, the A480 is pretty low on features, with a gamut of face detection, red eye correction, 15 shooting modes, and the motion detection technology.
The only manual settings this camera offers are the metering mode, ISO, white balance, and picture mode. Videos are taken at a low quality, 30 fps VGA. It runs on two AA batteries, which makes it quite heavy and it stores the photos on a SDHC memory card, placed in the same slot as the batteries.

Performance

If you want a fast camera, this absolutely can’t be your choice, being really slow. Shot to shot times, flash recycle times take a lot of time ( about 2 seconds ).  Considering it’s a low priced entry level camera, it’s pretty normal, but it could have been a bit faster.
The display is big enough, but has a low resolution and you can barely see anything on it in direct sunlight.

Image Quality

Amazingly, photos are taken at a high quality and really look good, for a camera in this price range. The colors are accurate and feature the level of saturation like most Canon cameras. The lens doesn’t seem to be very good though, because the photos lose sharpness.
Noise control is apparently good at ISO levels under 400, while ISO 800 and ISO 1600 photos are filled with grain.

Conclusion

The Canon Powershot A480 takes pretty good pictures, for its price, but it could do better. The price is really low, but there are many other cameras only a bit more expensive that do much better than this one.