The A720IS seems to generate a lot of debate regarding it's quality. If your really considering buying a Canon PowerShot A720IS digital camera, you need to consider both sides of the debate. With a plethora of digital camera salesman flooding the net, it's not hard to find someone to tell you how great the A720IS is. What you need is someone to point out it's faults. I'm more than happy to oblige.

The A720IS, can't seem to handle children, or other fast moving objects without manual intervention. Most of the time, you'll just end up with blurry pictures. Of all the auto settings this PowerShot offers, none seem to have a fast shutter speed. There is no "sports mode", and even the "kids mode" has a slower than expected shutter speed. You can of course select manual, but then you have to do all the settings manual, not just the shutter speed. This behaviour sort of defeats the whole purpose of being a simple to use point and shoot camera.

Compounding the original problem, is a slow flash recharge time. So, after you've taken your first blurry picture, you can expect to wait several seconds while the flash recharges. So much for taking a quick second photo to try and make up for the messed up one. The Canon A720IS (and several other Canons) only uses 2 double A batteries. Canon and others seem to have a tendency to overload the camera with large LCD screens, and power sucking flashes, and then cheap out in the battery power department. Even pro photographers rarely get the photo they want on the first shutter button squeeze.

If you need a little more coaxing to consider other cameras, here's a quick summary of other PowerShot A720IS problems:

- ISO settings above 400 produce very noisy images

- image stabilization produces questionable benefits

- wireless file transfer is absent

- windows software has less features then previous versions

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