Canon PowerShot A570IS 7.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom

I desperately needed an updated digital camera but with four kids didn't have a lot of time to read thru a thick manual. This camera is perfect for us. It takes great pictures, you can use it right out of the box and is compact enough to go in a purse or in our case a diaper bag. Well worth the money.

I got this camera for the situations when I don't want to bring my DSLR/lenses with me.
There are a few reasons I decided to get this particular camera over other P&S cameras.
1. Relatively inexpensive (I got it for 140 bucks, shipped).
2. Full manual control and manual focus.
3. Pretty small.
4. Not too many mega pixels. I don't want a camera with 10MP on a 1 cm sensor (the actual usable sensor size is much smaller than that anyway).
5. It works with CHDK, a 'hacked firmware' developed by the community, which allows all kind of neat stuff, such as motion detection, live histogram, RAW, and so on.

The quality of the image is pretty good for such a cheap and small camera. There is noise even at ISO 80 in full light. However, the camera will apply some noise reduction which takes care of the noise but removes some detail. By default, the camera will also sharpen the noise (well, actually the whole image), which looks bad. However, you can use the above mentioned CHDK firmware, and save the images as raw. Personally, I wouldn't go over ISO 80 with this camera, but I guess ISO 200 is OK too, to some extent.

The battery life is great, you can take 200+ pictures with a set of NiMh batteries, so long as you do not use the flash.

One thing I am not very happy about is the macro mode. If you take a picture of a normal size fly, the fly will be ~600 pixels long.
The zoom range (35-140mm) is also not ideal, but it's a compact camera, so some compromises have to be made.

Overall, I highly recommend it, it's probably the cheapest camera on the market that takes good quality pictures and has full manual controls.

This camera takes fantastic pictures!! the zoom woks great at 4x and image stabilization is such a great feature, no blurry pics!!! the screen is also very crisp and large. an all around camera that works great! not compact but packed with features.

This camera has the most important thing I've been looking for in a digital camera -- Good Indoor Shots -- . Other digital cameras that I've had did not provide good indoor shots but with an ISO 1600, this camera took great indoor shots. I also liked the image stabilization capability of the Canon 570.

I purchased the camera in March of this year and have rarely used it. The zoom quit working which is so disappointing. My previous Sony camera worked like a charm for four years until I lost it skiing in Colorado. Also, the Canon LED screen is impossible to see in daylight making pictures a little difficult. I would not buy this ever again.