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Sunday, Dec 03, 2006
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National

A digicam for the aspiring professional

Anand Parthasarathy

New features include `safe zoom' and digital tele converter

CLASSY POINT `N' SHOOT: The Canon PowerShot A 630 has features for the amateur who wants the job done professionally.

Bangalore: Like East and West in Rudyard Kipling's poem, the amateur and the professional photographer, inhabit separate worlds where `never the twain shall meet' — or so digital camera makers seem to think.

Customers are generally offered a choice of automatic point-n-click models made for dummies — and costly, top-of-the-line versions which seem to be little different from the bulky old analog days.

But occasionally, you can have the best of both worlds — and the PowerShot A 630, unveiled this year by Canon, at the mother of all photography shows, the Photokina, seamlessly crosses the `lakshman rekha' between photography for kicks and bucks.

The camera is now in India — and The Hindu was enabled to put one of the first pieces to come here through its paces.

At almost one-quarter kg, the A 630 is chunkier than most cameras for starters — and it takes 4 AA batteries instead of two. It is what they call an 8 megapixel model — that means each picture is made up of 8 million dots, enough to produce a sharp print even at large sizes like 8 inches by 10 inches (photo sizes are still reckoned in inches).

The 4x true optical zoom will seem like luxury to amateurs, who have had to live with digital zoom — when you squeeze the zoom button, the view leaps up dramatically, then settles into sharpness. Small green boxes on the 2.5-inch liquid crystal display tell you where in the picture the lens is focused — you can then change it to focus at any depth ... something the `pros' will appreciate. They will also like the ability to shun the `auto' settings and use the A 630 just like a standard camera — which means aperture settings from 2.8 to 4.1, shutter speeds from 15 seconds to 1/2500th second and zoom from 35 mm to 140 mm.

For those who want to live less dangerously, there is a `cool' Safety Zoom feature: If you use the zoom liberally, it will caution you when the image quality begins to deteriorate — by a small pause. You can also use the digital zoom to give you the effect of a telephoto lens... and the shutter speed will be increased to cancel the effects of camera shake. You can shoot a sequence of 9 frames in a second and also take a panorama view with overlapping shots. One of the neat tricks is to make the LCD display panel twistable in two planes — great when you have to shoot over the heads in a crowd. A standard viewfinder will allow you to shoot the way the professionals prefer — and conserve batteries at the same time. The camera we tried out came with a generous 256MB memory disk — but the default chip may be just 16 MB: It is wise to buy extra memory.

Like most contemporary digicams, the A 630 allows the user to directly download to PictBridge-type photo printers, but if you do have a PC or laptop, the free solutions CD, has some nice software to organise your pictures or mail them.

At just under Rs. 20,000, the Canon A 360 is not for the beginner — but for the frustrated amateur, within whom a creative professional is waiting to break free. Come on out and click!

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