Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon PowerShot A570 IS Digital Camera With Image Stabilizer - Silver (7.1MP, 4x Optical Zoom) 2.5" LCD

I've always been a Nikon owner in the past but finding myself financially restricted I was looking for a camera with a good name with plenty of features but within my limited budget. So no Nikon. This camera fits the bill perfectly. More features than you could shake a stick at. I'm not going to bore you by listing them all but the optical image stabilizer,picture quality,shooting modes,movie option,manual settings and menus are all pretty good. My gripes are the same as everyone elses. You will need to buy a decent memory card and rechargeable batteries. And the viewfinder whilst being welcome is not brilliant. Overall though an excellent camera for the money.

Having read the reviews here and elsewhere I can only think I was unlucky with my A570IS, which I have now returned as faulty. I bought it to replace a four or five year old 2MP Nikon compact. I tried it in all resolutions, focus and exposure modes and found that the images were consistently very 'soft' focus to the point of being blurred. I took comparison shots with the Nikon which were far clearer even though the file sizes were only a quarter of those from the Canon at high resolution. I'm an experienced photographer, but by no means infallible, so I phoned Canon Support to see if I was doing something stupid but they quickly decided the camera sensor was probably at fault. I guess this shouldn't put you off unless there are other similar reports - just my luck to get a bad one!

My experience of cameras is limited however it seems to be a neat enough package and I'd be happy with it, except for one major flaw. Maybe I bought the lemon, in a production run there has to be a few, but other comments suggest it's a basic fault of the camera, it really does eat batteries. I put in two feshly charged 2500mAh batteries and a less than an hour later and all of 13 shots it was complaining of low batteries. The same sort of performance I got from previous sets of batteries; the sort of performance that makes the camera essentially unusable. And Canon support is best described as lethargic.

I am 70 and my hands shake very badly after a stroke , this camera is brilliant very sharp clear photos,best camera i have had and so easy to use and the service of amazon was 110% as allways

I purchased one of these in June 2007 and have been using it ever since, and have now taken over 6000 photos on it, in all conditions, and it is still working. I was looking for something that was both light and small enough to take anywhere, and also with enough flexibility to cope with most situations. It has met and exceeded my expectations. As you can now buy it for half what I paid for it you can have a real bargain!

Obviously you need decent sized (and reasonably fast) memory cards if you are going to take many photos, same as any digital camera.

Yes, it does eat batteries, but there are several things you can do about this:
1. most of the power is used on starting, extending the lens and the powering the display, so rather than switching the camera on and off all the time, just turn the display on and off as needed. I have run it continuously all day like this (taking the odd picture of lecture presentations!)on one set of rechargeables.
2. Do not have image stabilisation (IS) running continuosly - alter the settings so that it only works when the shutter is depressed to the first setting (for focussing) - IS uses a lot of power.
3. 2500 mAh + rechargeables a must, but remember that they die pretty quickly if used hard - after less than a year I had a set gradually die on me, and first thought it was the camera (same faults as mentioned by others here), so don't necessarily blame it first.

I do have a couple of niggles - it does have a rather sensitive battery indicator, and, especially when cold will say that fully charged batteries are uncharged - take the batteries out and warm them up, the camera is then happy; switching position of the batteries helps also. Also, manual focussing is slow, and after switching the display off and on again the camera reverts to auto focus, why?