Canon PowerShot A560

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49288550,00.htm

Reviewed 21 March 2007

Reviewed by Will Greenwald

Canon's PowerShot A560 is a suitable big brother to the company's lower-end PowerShot A550. Both models sport the same chunky-but-comfortable design, 7-megapixel sensor, and 4x optical zoom lens. The A560 distinguishes itself from the A550 (and justifies its slightly higher price) with a larger LCD screen, a higher maximum ISO, and a couple of other features made possible by its upgraded Digic III processor chip. The A550 has Canon's older Digic II chip.

You'll have to decide if these differences are important to you, but the fact remains that the £160 A560 is a solid, inexpensive snapshot camera.

Design
Though not quite small enough to slip into your jeans, the A560 is still comfortably compact. At 215g and 43mm thick, the camera can fit easily into most jacket pockets and bags.

The A560's body has the same L-shaped design found on most of Canon's PowerShot A series, giving it a generous grip. Plus its large buttons are comfortable to use, and they're laid out logically along the back and the top of the camera.

Features
The A560 looks fairly nondescript, but does offer some interesting features. Most notable among its attributes is its 35mm-to-140mm-equivalent 4x zoom lens, which gives it just a little more range than the 3x lenses found on most budget cameras. Canon augments the 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen with an optical viewfinder for shooting in dim light or tight quarters.

The camera's sensitivity reaches up to ISO 1600, a notch higher than the A550's ISO 800. Another feature the A560 lords over the A550 is face detection. Canon buries the control in the menu system under the artificial intelligent autofocus (aiaf) setting, rather than giving it a dedicated button as many of its competitors do, so don't be confused. We found Canon's face detection quick and accurate.

Besides those features, the A560 has the standard handful of scene presets and image-adjustment settings. The camera boasts four movie modes, including 30 frames per second (fps) VGA (640x480 pixels) and a pleasantly unexpected 60fps QVGA (320x240 pixels) high-speed mode. Finally, like most Canon PowerShot A-series cameras, the A560 conveniently takes AA batteries.

Performance
The A560 performed well in almost all our tests. After quickly starting up and capturing its first image in 1.5 seconds, we could snap a shot once every 1.6 seconds, a great improvement over similar previous PowerShot models. Unfortunately, with the onboard flash enabled, that time nearly tripled to 4.5 seconds per shot.

Shooting speed (seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (typical)

Olympus FE-190

1.9 

2 

0.7 

Canon PowerShot A550

1.7 

1.5 

0.5 

Canon PowerShot A560

1.6 

1.5 

0.5 

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W35

1.4 

1.4 

0.4 

Kodak EasyShare C875

1.4 

2 

0.2 

The camera's shutter proved responsive, lagging only 0.5 seconds with our high-contrast target and a modest 1.4 seconds with our low-contrast target. In burst mode, we managed to capture 35 full-resolution shots in 21.6 seconds for a rate of 1.6 frames per second.

Image quality
Photos looked pretty good, though they're marred by overprocessing and fringing in spots. Colours reproduce well, though indoor photos shot with automatic white balance come out very yellow, a common problem for most snapshot cameras.

Noise is low up to ISO 400 sensitivity, where a fine grain starts to appear. Images are predictably noisy at ISO 800 and ISO 1600 sensitivity, with speckling damaging fine details and softening colours. ISO 800 and higher settings are usually reserved for low-light and high-speed shooting, and everyday snapshots shouldn't have many problems.

Conclusion
With quick performance and decent photos, the Canon PowerShot A560 makes a solid budget camera. It doesn't boast a bevy of special features and isn't particularly small or light, but it's a strong choice if you don't want to spend much for your snapshots. If your caffeine-ridden, shaky hands often make your pictures blurry, you should note that the next model up in Canon's line, the A570IS, is very similar to this one, but also includes optical image stabilisation.

Additional editing by Nick Hide