Canon PowerShot A85
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Canon PowerShot A85

A moderately priced four-megapixel digital camera that's perfect for beginners

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Price: £239
Manufacturer: Canon
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Packed with features and easy to use but let down by poor battery life

Emilie Martin, Computeractive 05 Nov 2004

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The cameras in Canon's Powershot range are designed to simplify the process of taking pictures and the latest addition, the four-megapixel A85, is no exception.

Pretty much all the settings you'll need for a range of shots are easily accessible on the body of the camera, which means you can ignore the menu system most of the time and concentrate on snapping.

There are 13 preset scene modes that adjust the camera's settings to best suit your environment. Six special settings are available to bring out the colours in beach or snow scenes, among others.

Manual settings can be tinkered with as your confidence increases. Using the macro mode, you can take close-ups as near as 5cm from your subject. The 3x optical zoom lets you focus on far away objects too.

Picture quality was superb: colours were faithfully reproduced and images were uniformly sharp. Unfortunately, the four AA batteries that the camera needs add a lot of weight to the unit and don't provide much shooting time before you need to change them. A 32Mb memory card is included.

You can pick up cheaper four-megapixel cameras these days, but the A85's versatility, image quality and range of features make it worthy of consideration.

Contact: Canon 08705 143723
www.canon.co.uk

See also:

Canon Ixus 30A compact and versatile camera which proves that paying a bit extra is sometimes worth it  09 Feb 2005
Samsung Digimax V50An unforgiving but feature-packed camera  12 Nov 2004
Canon Powershot S60Well-featured 5megapixel compact  12 Nov 2004
Fujifilm Finepix A3404megapixel camera for the novice snapper.  30 Sep 2004
Centon DC5An excellently priced five-megapixel camera.  12 Aug 2004
Canon Powershot A80An impressive performing camera.  22 Jul 2004

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