For Christmas I bought my mother a digital camera and printer. At first I was going to go with a Kodak bundle. The printers had good reviews, but the cameras didn't. Then I thought about an HP bundle. The cameras had good reviews, but the printers didn't. At that point I said skip the bundles and find a good printer and a good camera, separately. For the camera, I ended up going with a 7.1 megapixel, 4X optical zoom lens Canon PowerShot A560. It has very good reviews and I have a Canon PowerShot A610 which I've been happy with. Turns out I made a good choice. The Canon PowerShot A560 is a very nice camera. For a beginner photographer, the photo quality is excellent. The camera has 14 shooting modes, including 6 special scene modes. The various modes include night time, kids & pets who are moving, portrait, and an automatic feature. That is the setting my mother uses most often and the photos are very good. The camera automatically adjusts the focal length, ISO to take the best photo for the current lighting conditions.
The camera is about half the size of my older A610, which is nice.
The Canon PowerShot A560 takes 2 AA batteries, a step up from my Canon PowerShot A610 which takes 4 AA batteries and seems to eat them up very fast.
The Canon Powershot A560 uses a DIGIC III Image Processor to get the best image quality, so that the camera works efficiently and battery life is improved. Face detection and red eye correction features have also been improved.
There is a high-resolution 2.5-inch LCD to make viewing easy and there are four movie modes, including 30 fps VGA and 60 fps fast frame rate.
A Print/Share button makes it easy to print photos or transfer them to a computer. The Canon PowerShot A560 is PictBridge enabled.
The only complaint I have about the A560 and A610 is the lag time between shots. I used the A610 at a wrestling match and it wasn't the greatest for taking photos one right after the other. There was a bit of a pause between each shot while the camera refocused for the next shot. Afterwards, I played around with some settings and was able to decrease the lag time a bit.
So, if you are in the market for a good quality, reasonably priced digital camera, I highly recommend the Canon PowerShot A560.
Check out this link for my review of the printer I bought to go with the camera. It too is excellent.
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