I got my first digital camera during the thanksgiving time on black friday. As mentioned in title I purchased the Canon A 520. At this time of the year all electronics are cheaper than the prices offered at all other times. My camera does not come with a carry case as it is handy and can be slid into any regular trousers or chinos but not jeans.
the criteria I took into consideration<b/>
Resolution: I had decided upon the 4 pixel resolution mainly because of price considerations and thats enough for an amateur photographer who takes pics for hobby.
Digital zoom: 3.6 x which is the amount of times a picture is magnified if you want to focus on a part of a image. one thing to consider is that using too much digital zoom causes the image to blurr which is not good news.
optical zoom; 4x was enough for me as I generally dont take long ranging shots. I generally take wild life photos so I cant go too close to the creatures as they get scared so I went for this.
Memory: this camera came with an external memory card, but had only 16MB of memory. not enough for someone who is going for long trips to many states or for long days. better to buy a memory card with atleast 512MB memory.
Cost of the camera: $190 including tax and accessories which include cables to connect to TV. USB port with cable . can be connected to a portable DVD player, Television, printers, PC.
Comes with a software to download photos from camera and also has features to edit pictures and also to add effects to pictures.
other features:
Versatile shooting modes include auto, portrait, landscape, night scene, fast shutter, slow shutter, shutter priority, aperture priority, manual, movie mode and stitch-assist mode
8 special scene modes include foliage, snow, beach, fireworks, underwater, indoor, kids/pets and night snapshot
Auto, daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, fluorescent H and custom white balance controls to achieve natural tones under different lighting conditions; built-in auto flash with red-eye reduction and flash on/off modes
Special photo effects include black-and-white, sepia, vivid, low sharpening and neutral for creative images
Video mode with audio captures video clips at 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120 resolutions (up to 3 minutes, 30 seconds maximum at 640 x 480 resolution)
the pictures can be downloaded with any windows version. software installation not needed.
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