Canon PowerShot A430

Was very disappointing that canon were not even able or prepared to tell me what was wrong unless I agreed to pay the repair charge of £72. I can buy a new a470 for just another £20, so no point in repairing the unit.

Light, easy to use, good positions of the buttons, very good photos. The screen is a bit small. Very good little camera. The Canon Powershot A430 is well worth the money.

I love this camera.If you are looking for a good camera - this is the one! Great one for the price and the pic's are great.

The Canon PowerShot A430 is a very good camera for the price. The common AA batteries ensures you get power anywhere. I use NiMH rechargeables, and can shoot several dozen pictures without recharging. There are more than enough shooting modes and other features, such as portrait mode or color accent. As a testament to the ruggedness of canon cameras, my A430 fell on cement on the lens when it was out. I thought it was not going to be able to fix it, but after a little disassembly, the lens snapped back into the track, and the camera works as new. I have taken over 2500 pictures and still enjoy photographing with it.

The only downside is the video file format uses 128Mb for a 3 min video.

I ordered the Canon PowerShot A430 for my 14 year old daughter before Christmas (she paid the £75). She has hardly been separated from it since.

The camera is packed with features, the functions are fairly intuitive and it is quite easy to get started with the camera - although the more complex functions (such as stitch assist and colour swap) might need referral to the manual.

We haven't used the Canon capture software on the PC so I can't comment on that.

The 4x zoom compensates for the 4.1mega pixel capacity - although for 6x4 prints I think 4.1 is way more than needed.

The image quality and all-round ability of the camera amazes me. It can cope with indoor / outdoor / low light / flash very well even with auto settings. The flash range is probably average for a small camera.

Video is only 320 x 240 - but the frame rate is very good, it copes well with low light and the sound quality is very good whether loud or quiet.

My favourite feature is the Super Macro - this can focus at 1cm and produces some stunning images.

I'd definitely recommend this camera - or it's bigger brother the Powershot 530 which I've also used. Our main problem now is that my daughter has taken around 10Gb of photos and storing and organising them is getting to be a problem!

The Canon PowerShot A430 is very easy to use and has a wide range of features. the 4 megapixels are quite disappointing and the impressive advanced features are actually quite hard to use considering this camera is and entry level low budget model. For the price the camera is excellent, but it could do with being a little more accessible to low-budget armatures.