Canon 1074C013 PowerShot SX620 HS Digital Camera - White

Compact cameras now have serious competition from smart phones, so why should you carry one with you? The picture quality should be better with a bigger lens, and they also have a superior flash. This model immediately impressed me because it was heavy, not enough to weigh your pocket down, but indicates a solid build. To operate, charge the battery with the supplied charger, load a memory card (not supplied but these days very cheap) and press the button.The manual is very thick, but on inspection is a very short multilingual introduction; you have to download the full version that struggled like heck on my laptop. Fortunately, most functions are intuitive and you can work out most settings from the camera. I found the P mode was sufficient for most shots, like the EOS counterpart. For indoor shots, pressing the flash button releases the pop up flash. This is the only way they could fit a flash because the lens and surrounding mechanism takes up most of the front on what is in reality a very small camera.Two settings to consider are ISO, where I prefer the lowest, 80, as long as there is enough light; and the compression where I use the super fine image setting. This produces the best jpeg quality but with larger files. For 32 gig cards and above this will not be a problem, and you can always edit them before sharing.The zoom operates smoothly, and you can have both optical and digital as standard for compact cameras, the display is bright with a large screen, not touch, but the controls will allow you to navigate and manipulate the images. As a concession to the smartphone and tablet era, you can send pictures to your device using the downloaded app. For this you need to connect to your WiFi.So the most important aspect of any camera is picture quality. The few shots I have taken have been very impressive, giving my EOS 650D a run for its money. Indoor pictures with the flash are correctly exposed, and available light ones are good too given the higher ISO setting. This is all in a camera small enough to take on your travels when you don’t want to lug an SLR around.

This is a nice little camera and takes excellent pictures. I found that in shooting in bright daylight, the brightness of the screen needs to be at maximum to see what you are shooting. I brought it as I wanted something easy to carry - I have a large Fuji bridge camera which I find something of a beast to carry all the time. I'm 77 and the days of lugging a (D)SLR with a load of lenses are long gone! I would have liked a little more control such as aperture or shutter priority, but what can you expect at the price? I have two major criticisms however. One is that the small size makes setting any lettering are real pain. It took me half a dozen tries to get my router password in correctly. This isn't helped by the setting ring to be extremely sensitive and has to be touched in just the right position. My TiVo box is just the same. More importantly is the problems I've encountered with down loading. I installed the app on my smart phone, and that works fine. However, trying to transfer to my PC turned out to be a nightmare. I'd rather keep my pictures there and be able to edit them. First if all, I tried an html to USB cable. Nothing happened. Then I tried to download the connection software. There is a long 'how to do this' on the Canon site which are pretty useless, but no where does it appear to give an actual download button. Then I tried removing the card from the camera and using a card reader. My PC told me that the card needed formatting which, of course, would lead to the loss of all pictures and videos. Putting the card back in the camera resulted in a message that it was now corrupted. Having a corrupt 16 gig card was no good to me. The pictures I had taken were not so important that I could not loose them, so I decided to have the PC format it. The camera was then able to recognise it again. I then used a data recovery program which did find the jpegs, but had problems with the videos I'd taken. I suppose the work round is to transfer all pictures to the card in my phone, then put that into a reader and choose what to transfer. But what a faff! I guess the wifi connect to a phone is to satisfy the Instagram fraternity, but I must say that this gimmick my be one too far and for this old forget it's more of a case that the old systems weren't broke so why mend.

Ok, we have phones and iPads etc, but this is a camera and it does have more functions. How well it will perform for the money really depends on how much you want to explore and use those functions. I bought a hard case to protect this, a large storage disk or two and then off we go. I didn't like the download/on line main intruction manual. I like to sit with a book style manual and go through it.We went to Norway and did glimpse the Northern Lights. After modifying my settings, the camera took really quite unbelievable pictures, ones I could not see with my naked eye. All those with phones just couldn't make the images come through as the shutter speed adjustment seemed lacking on the phones. I also loved the creative function and the fact that movies give samples as photos as a matter of course. The camera has a lot of play and photographing in it for a single charge. The ability to be mounted on a tripod is useful and to be fair, wheat I would expect of any stand alone camera. The main reason we wanted this camera was the wifi function. This means I can remotely see the picture, set it to record from my phone or iPad etc, also I can download the photos without messing about with leads. For that function alone, the camera is great.I bought the white model and it is a lovely mix of steel/aluminium and white. The zoom does go to x50, but then you really do need a tripod or stand. In context, it zooms like a very decent pair of binoculars! Great little addition and much, much better than a phone!