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| Canon PowerShot A650IS 12.1MP Digital Camera with 6x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom | 
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| Brand: Canon
Category: Photography
Buy New: $409.00
Buy New/Refurbished from $409.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (81 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2113
Media: Electronics
Batteries Included: Yes
Floppy Disk Drive: None
Optical Zoom: 6
Digital Zoom: 4
Display Size: 2.5
Battery: 4 AA
Maximum Focal Length: 44.4
Minimum Focal Length: 7.4
Maximum Resolution: 12.1
Has Red Eye Reduction: Yes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 4.4 x 2.7 x 2.2
MPN: A650IS
Model: A650IS
UPC: 013803086461
EAN: 0013803086461
ASIN: B000V20R28
Release Date: September 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 WOW Canon November 13, 2007
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
I upgraded from a Canon A80 for my recent vacation... and this camera is awesome. Very simple to use with excellent features and outstanding pictures. The image stabilizer makes an obvious difference/improvement. Go Canon!
Beautiful Pictures, but know what you are buying November 9, 2007
30 out of 31 found this review helpful
The Canon a650 takes beutiful pictures. I have a high end, digital SLR as well, and while I can notice differences with larger prints, the image quality is not that far off. I would say the difference is more due to the lenses than the cameras. It is not that the lens in the a650 is bad -just that I bought expensive lenses for the SLR.
While the price for the a650 may be daunting for a point-and-shoot, please note that the a650 is internally identical to the Canon G9, which cost another $100 and cannot use AA batteries.
One caution to note, however, is that this camera is heavy and big. It weighs close to a pound with batteries and will not fit in you pocket. Before you buy, go hold the camera. I almost bought the sd950 for its smaller size, but decided that I could not relay only on rechargible batteries, which is ironic considering my SLR only uses reechargibles and I have never had problems.
 Does many things well October 12, 2007
137 out of 138 found this review helpful
I wanted the tilt/swivel LCD of the A640 but knew that model must soon be upgraded. I waited, and as soon as this A650 came out, I bought it. My recent experience is mostly with a Nikon D50 SLR (and before that, many generations of film SLRs). This purchase is our "small" camera, less obtrusive than the big black Nikon, easier to tote on a casual walk, less obvious in a social occasion, easier to smuggle into places where photography is "not permitted."
The A650 has exceeded my expectations in many ways. Looking at their images at full resolution on a calibrated monitor, there are only slight differences between the Nikon and the A650: mainly, the A650 betrays a slight blue fringing of high-contrast details in the extreme edges of the frame. This most likely betrays the smaller, cheaper lens design (the lens on the Nikon cost more than the A60 camera!). Aside from this flaw, only noticeable under extreme enlargement, I don't see any difference in sharpness, saturation, or accuracy of color.
Although it is small alongside an SLR with zoom lens, the A650 is a chunky handful compared to tiny point-and-shooters from, e.g., Panasonic. It won't fit in a shirt pocket unless you wear a lumberjack's shirt, but it is small enough to get into the hip pocket of my Levi 501's, or into the slash pocket of a windbreaker. Part of the bulk is because it uses 4xAA batteries instead of some small, proprietary battery. This is a huge plus in my view: batteries are available everywhere, and I already have a charger and a box of rechargeable AAs.
The menus are clear. The controls are like other Canon Powershot models, so would be familiar to Canon owners. Coming from a different brand, I had to get used to the various buttons, which was not difficult, a testimony to the sensible design of the Canon. Most common options are available from a single "FUNC SET" button that pops up a terse menu on the LCD. All the key actions are ready to hand: deleting the most recent image, awkward with some cameras, is quick and easy; setting Macro/Normal/Manual focus, or Flash On/Auto/Off, is also quick.
The tilting, swivelling LCD is a great feature! You can store it face-in, so it won't get scratched in a pocket or glovebox. You can turn it completely around to compose a picture of yourself. You can turn it face-down so you can hold the camera high over your head and compose a shot over a crowd, or turn it face-up so you can hold the camera at your side and take stealth shots walking down the street. The LCD is bright, but on a sunny day you must still shade it to read it.
This camera even does very decent video! It will put 15 minutes of 640x480/30fps video on a 2GB chip. Recently I needed to record a lot more than that, and the A650 was the only camcorder handy, so I set it to do 320x240/30fps. That format allowed over 45 minutes of recording on a 2GB chip. Using nothing but the naked A650 (no tripod, no external mic) I got acceptable amateur video of a family reunion dinner, capturing speeches and interviews clearly. Using Apple's iMovie and iDVD, I was able to mail out DVDs of the occasion to participants in a few days. The A650 would certainly serve any parent wanting to capture a school play or dance recital.
Good image quality, convenient controls, video ability, an LCD that does the hula -- what's not to like? Well, there are a few minor things to complain about.
One, the optical viewfinder is near-useless, a disappointment to me as I am used to composing in the optical finder of an SLR. There's no picture info in the finder. It crops a good 10% from the actual image. The barrel of the lens protrudes into the finder image at some zoom ratios. The LCD is the only practical way to compose. The finder is a barely-useful fallback when the ambient light is so high the LCD is unreadable.
Two, you zoom by swivelling a lever left or right, and I just can't get it straight whether I push left or right to zoom IN. And, the zoom is hard to control: after I push the lever the wrong way, I push it the other way and quickly overshoot the composition I want, and have to zoom back, jerk, jerk, jerk. There is just no comparison to rotating the zoom ring on the barrel of an SLR lens, which is a smooth and natural way to compose.
Three, a camera with this quality of image, and support for aperture- and shutter-priority as well as full manual control (all of which it has) really ought to support RAW. The "fine" mode JPGs are indeed good quality but how hard could it be to just NOT process the image data?
An irritation that the manual in fact warns about: the in-camera microphone captures every sound of your fingers on the controls. If you zoom during a video, the click-clack of the zoom lever is very audible on the soundtrack.
Finally, I have yet to test the A650 in low-light, high-ISO situations. I have hopes that the upgraded "DIGIC III" processor will do well, but can't say that it does. Other than these issues, the A650 in daily use is pleasant and comfortable. I expect to get many years and images out of it.
Feature rich camera to grab and go September 29, 2007
36 out of 37 found this review helpful
Got this as the small camera when I don't want to tote my DSLR. I've had a PowerShot before...this look and feel is similar to one I got years ago.
It feels good in the hand...easy to shoot one-handed, and is good if you have bigger hands.
Menus are fairly intuitive, and buttons are there for more commonly used functions.
I used this during the day and at night. It performed well in both cases. Obviously noise at high ISOs, but where very dark, it doesn't show up as much.
I feel the construction, while not metal, is still sturdy. It should be kept in a well-padded little camera bag.
Key features are the image stabilization and high ISO, which result in more sharp pictures; also the 180 degree flip out screen, which you can use for getting yourself in the picture easier.
Issues:
Would prefer shorter option for picture review time than 2 seconds...otherwise, you have to turn off the review altogether.
Beyond Outstanding! September 19, 2007
133 out of 134 found this review helpful
The first reviewer did such a fantastic job reviewing this camera there is little more I can add.
As a professional photographer, I've owned a lot of cameras. I still have and shoot medium and large format film but in the smaller 35mm size, I now shoot nearly 100% digital. For my small digitals, I own several of the G-series and a couple of the A-Series PowerShot cameras, including the A710IS. It's a very, very good camera but I did not like the flash, battery life, or the non-flip LCD viewer.
Canon fixed the flash, doubled the batteries, and put the flip-LCD in! Also, the new SD-SDHC cards are supported. The San Disc 4GB Extreme III with the card reader is the perfect flash memory card for it too.
This is, by a wide margin, the best "pocketable" camera available on the market today at any price. The words "Landmark Product" come to mind.
If the nearly $400 takes your breath away, save up for it and wait until the price drops a bit.
For those like me on the perpetual upgrade treadmill spending $400-$700 every year for the incremental features we need and want, we've finally reached that illusive destination!
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