Canon PowerShot A85

You could not better the all round performance from the Canon PowerShot A85.

If you want a camera that you can set to auto and point and shoot or use some of the extra settings it will not be beaten.

Highly recommended

The Canon Powershot A85 might just be the best overall camera in its class. Here's why...

Image Quality: The image quality on the A85 is most impressive. It's 4.0 MP can capture amazing stills that look so good you'd swear they were film photographs. Even the colouring of the images is crisp and just about dead on.

Features: It has in the user settings: Manual, Apature Value, Time Value, Personal.

Automatic settings: Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night and Scene (which is for different lighting situations.)

Overall the features on this camera are great! And will satisfy most experts (the non Picky kind) and novice alike!

Battery Life: With four batteries this camera lasts 2.5x longer then a 2 battery camera because there is more of a charge. The batteries last about 150-200 pictures using normal AA Alkaline Batteries. If you use dollar store batteries then they'll last 8-10 pictures. This is pretty good. And think of Batteries for a digital camera as film that way they don't seem so expensive.

Ease of Use: This camera is so easy to use you'll think you're a photographic genius when you start seeing great images that you took. And maybe you actually are and you didn't know it?

Value for money: The A85 is very affordable and is a wonderful deal now. Around $200 US which is a pretty amazing deal!

Overall Rating: I give this camera a 9/10! Mainly because it serves the user so well. It is one of the best P&S cameras on the market.

Review by ChristopherMartin

I have now owned the Canon Powershot A85 for about 8 months. In that time it has been on a diving holiday in Egypt where it took excellent underwater pictures. It has an underwater setting which automatically adds red tones, making the photos good colour. It is light and compact making it good for carrying out in the evenings, althouh the flash can be very harsh whiting out some subjects. It has also been to Thailand where it was used mainly for sightseeing type shots. Although the picture quality is generally sharp in lower light it struggles to focus and high ISos mean grainy pictures. If you over-ride a lot of the auto settings the camera produces excellent shots. Over I bought the camera because it is compact, light has maunal functions as well as point and shoot, together with an inexpensive underwater case.

I am pleased with the camera and would recommend it for ease of use and flexibility, although I think the seriuos photographer would find it quite limiting.

I bought this camera to replace my Powershot A65 which had become faulty after 9 months, and the supplier refunded my money. After reviewing the current market I decided that Canon have still got the edge on ergonomic design on all the others (I used to love their SLRs when I used them), and the results from my A65 were brilliant for a 2M pixel camera. The A85 is very similar to the A65 except it is 4M pixel, having all the same excellent easy to use features and a few more. Most importantly, the results are brilliant, and the extra pixels mean you can crop or digital zoom without reducing the quality to an unacceptable level.

My only criticism is that there is a delay after pressing the shutter release, which is common to most digital cameras, making some action shots a bit of a lottery. However I wouldn't swap it for any other camera on the market. And I've sold my last SLR!