Canon PowerShot A400

Opinion: I bought this for my Daughter's 16th birthday and she LOVES it! Very easy to use. Stylish. and takes great pictures. She was able to use this right away and is not computer literate.

Good:

Great LCD
It's a Canon
Price
Style
Simplicity
Some advanced manual fuctions
Takes really nice, colorful, lively photos.
Light
Fast

Opinion: I bought the camera at Sears, in Chicago (I live in Brazil).
I have Canon cameras, analog and also the Canon PS S30.
Using the A400 gave me good surprise, as it is above my expectation for the price (I paid around USD160.-).
The images are quite sharp, and the ease of use is nice.
The good point is that the A400 does not have the sliding door as in the S30 (which broke for me, and I expended about US80.- to fix). The zooming in the replay is better in the A400 than in S30.
The weak point, as I found, is that it does not have the all adjustments (manual time, aperture etc).
Another point is that the memory is SD and not CF as in S30 - so I could not use my CF cards I had. And the extra 128MB SD card I bought at the time of camerapurchase, is quite slow, so when I make a picture, many times I have to "wait" to see again the image for a next picture taking.
Another advantage is the battery for the A400, which is a normal AA type (but recharger does not comes with camera - I had to buy it).
Unfortunately the direct power converter (to replace batteries for direct AC connection) is different for the A400 from the S30 (but is dangerously same the connector! - take care!); voltage is half that for S30.
The size of the digital display of the A400 is smaller than for the S30 - which is against the actual trend in increasing these display sizes.
In summary it is an excellent camera, but has some few weak point. Still I strongly recommend it.

Opinion: I bought it a week ago here in Brazil, and I took many pictures. It's macro is very very very very good! It is really about 4 cm. The photos are very good, it is well easy to use. A feature I saw and I judge very important: the zoom lens is inside, it doesn't "grow out" when you activate the zoom. You can get good photos in the dark (not total darkness) using the AF light. I recommend it!

Opinion: I bought it last night, January 9, 2005 and I browsed the manual and was able to use it in less than an hour. It has very good resolution and ease of use like what I read in the reviews. The lcd screen has the highest resolution setting compared to other cameras in the same 3.2 megapixel range, which was very good in viewing shots taken. The price would also be very competitive compared with other cameras in its class.