Canon PowerShot A400

Opinion: Great basic camera. I used it for several months. When I bought it, it had the best feature set in its price range.
The "manual mode" actually is a "Program AE" mode, like in most of Canon SD series.
The image quality is superb, I always liked the colors from Canon digital cameras. The lens sharpness is very good too. One peculiar thing is that the lens dos not get darker as you rise the zoom... great for telephoto lovers.

Opinion: I bought this camera for my father in 2005.
He is a seaman and uses it on his travels.
It is a very simple camera but it makes good pictures(also with flash). Movis are also good.
On or two times he dropped it to the ground but it still works. Must be good build quality.
For a small price and a photo-beginner the A4xx series from Canon is the best you can get.

Opinion: This is a good camera for everyday use, ie group photos, houses, portraits. I would reccomend this for the complete beginner to digital photography as that what I used it for when I started.

Opinion: I have used this camera for a while, and I'm very happy of the performance, image quality and overall ! I've got the camera always with me, has dropped it few times, cold and hot weather, on the beach--still working fine , I've made 2-3000 photos so far , and haven't met any problems ! It's really worth the money ! Acceptable ISO range 50-400, not very "noisy" images at 400, compared to other in its class! The Automatic modes are good for beginers.

Opinion: I like Powershot A400 because mainly it uses non proprietary AA batteries, SD/MMC card. Automatic mode for beginners, Manual override like ISO, Exposure Compensation, Colour Effects like B&W, Sepia are useful features. Under flat lighting (low contrast lighting) pictures come out really well without the eyes looking like black holes. Of course contrast is matter of personal taste. Digital photography does'nt make you a better photographer - Digital just makes it cheaper and easier since you don't need to buy film and process it - just learn to use available light the best way you can if you can't use lighting equipment. Small 1.5 inch display is good enough to frame and review images. 50-100mm (approx 35mm equiv.) lens is ideal for portraits. In general a very good digital camera considering the price of around US$200/-.

Opinion: I have the small A400 and a Sony Dsc S40 as well.
Canon is better for external pics and Sony for interior pics.
For video , Sony is better with unlimited time video, (Only by the card capacity)otherwise the card is more expensive.
I like the Canon auto focus led.

Opinion: I bought this camera at Game Store, here at oshakati, Namibia.I have already taken 50 photos with this camera. All photos are of high quality.i am a happy man now. the camera was on sale[N$1495-00]. CANON,Power Shot A400,is the right camera for anyone who wants good results.

Opinion: An excellent compact digital camera.Autorotate portait pics,fast auto focus,good clear canon lens,picture clarity, fair zoom,full metal body.Batery life seems good with 2 AA Ni-MH rechargables(not included).Excellent price (just 150€uros in greece)

Opinion: I got this camera for my parents. The prime criteria were that it had to be cheap, simple, modern, and use AA or Li batteries. On all these counts the camera is either good or excellent.

- At a price of $151 with free shipping it certainly qualified as cheap.

- It isn’t quite as simple as I would like it to be. Canon needs to fix their tungsten auto white balance because I can’t teach my technophobe mom to change it before taking pictures. (She sets it for indoors and then takes it outdoors with her and vice versa. I have a theory that the icon’s for the WB presets are too small for her to see and she doesn’t want to admit it.) I’m also considering turning off the “AI auto focus” because it seems to have a habit of wrecking scenic shots by focusing on some intervening branch or grass. Other than that it requires very little thinking to use.

- The best part about this camera, taken together with its price, is that it is fully modern. The build quality is great. The lens is nice and sharp, and offers a fair amount of optical zoom; but not so much that it tempts my parents to hand shoot stuff the shouldn’t be :-). Startup, shutdown, storage, playback, zooming, etc. are very fast. The only time it feels slow, is that the screen goes black while the flash is charging. The screen is small, but very bright and sharp.

- Battery life is quite good. I got some 2300 Li batteries and a charger to go with the camera. One charge is plenty of power for any reasonable single day of pictures my parents might take.

Other notes:

By default the camera has a pretty severe over sharpening problem. Fortunately there is a low sharpening mode that takes very nice pictures. This is the only useful image adjustment.

Flash performance is decent for a camera of this class, but nothing to write home about.

The camera has a rapid fire mode, but it doesn’t work well with the screen. The viewfinder is just a + in the middle of a box. The only success I have had with it is taking action shots of things like moving cars in moderate light.

Finally, the software bundle is disappointing. Install the drivers and the Canon software, but only use it to move pictures to your computer. Picasa2 is a much better (and free) solution for novice users. And power users can get the Gimp, also for free.

[updated at same time as below]

The coolest feature on here is the action shot / continuous drive / rapid fire mode. I have done some sports photography with this camera that I couldn't have done with any other cheap camera. It is poorly documented so I will explain:

To use the rapid fire mode properly first turn off the AiAf (force it to focus on the center of the frame) and then turn off the display. Use the viewfinder and put the + on your subject and focus.

Now for the cool part: AS LONG AS YOU KEEP IT HALF PRESSED, YOU CAN SHOOT VERY QUICKLY WITH NEARLY NO LAG. It works better if you don't just hold the button down.