Sorry about the delay guys. Ths camera has been lying with me for the last 3 weeks + and though I had promised a review ASAP, I never really got around to it till today!
Introduction and why I chose the A-520!
I set out looking for a reasonably priced and decent quality digicam (read sasta, sundar, tikau) that would replace my ageing Nikon 2100...
The parameters that were very important to me were low light perfomance and good battery life so to make the selection process as objective as possible, I did what I usually do, which is create a spreadsheet with weighted averages for different parameters namely:
Size/Weight/Form Factor: 0.05
Picture quality under good conditions: 0.15 Picture quality under bad ligting/overcast/late evenings/indoors: 0.3 Battery life: 0.15 Manual control options (f/shutter speed/ISO/exp): 0.15 Optical Zoom: 0.15 Other factors: 0.05
Now within my budget (~10K), the plausible popular choices were the Canon A520, Nikon 4600 and the Sony S-90 I am not a great fan of Olympus/Kodak/Minolta/Vivitar etc when it comes to digicams..Not that I like Sony either, but from what I hear, the Carl Zeiss lenses on Sony's are real good, which is why i decide to include the S-90 in the list of probables
After a few store visits and camera trials this is what the final tally looked like:
Here is a subjective analysis of why these points for the A-520
Size/Weight/Form Factor:
Housed in a silver gray plastic casing, the A-520 looks far from plasticky.
I wouldn't term the build quality as flawless, but it is certainly not bad either. The overall dimensions at 3.6 x 2.5 x 1.5 in however make it noticeably bigger than the ultra compact and sleek 4600.
However, it looks visually smaller than the S-90.The 238gm weight also doesn't make it the lightest kid on the block.
No gripes with the ergonomics though as the curved hand grip abd the easy to reach out controls make clicking shots a breeze.
The automated prset scene modes (13 to be precise) are convenient, and easily selectable.
Reaching out to the manual controls is a little inintutitve though. More on that later.
Pros: Good Quality Quality, Good ergonomics
Cons: Relatively bulky and big, Small LCD, no swivel for LCD
Picture quality under good conditions Most camera do a good job at this and the A-520 is no exception.
Though I still haven't seen a single bright sunny day since i picked this one up, the picture below is nonetheless good. I'd expect the picture clarity to be better on a nice sunny day.
The white balance seems to be slightly skewed towards blue. But that's perhaps true for most consumer digicams as that presents nice bright pictures that people love looking at.
The Auto balance mode doesn't do too good a job under tubelights or bulbs, but manually selecting fluorscent/incandescent brings the White balance back to Normal.
Pros: What do I say
...well, Nice picture quality in good lighting Cons: None i can think of
Picture quality under bad lighting/overcast/late evenings/indoors:
This is one area where the A-520 shines. Pictures taken at evening time, or even after dusk under city lighting turned out to be really good with fairly good exposure.
However, under very poor lighting, the camera shifts to ISO400 mode where the image noise gets highly noticeable.
The Image noise is bearable upto ISO200 (ISO 50 and 100, there is no visible noise) but gets inexcusably high at ISO400.
The workaround of course is to shift to manual mode and increase the aperture and shutter timings, but the ISO400 picture quality was a big disappointment
Pros: very good low light performance. Nice well exposed photos even in Auto mode in evening/city lighting, Best in class low light auto focus capabilities (the Nikon 4600 failed miserably on this front), good colrs, balance and exposure in poor lighting
Cons: Poor ISO400 performance
Battery life
Sweet! 1 pair of 2500mAH batteries lasts almost forever. Really, I am not kidding.
I have been shooting lots of photographs over the last 1+ mnths (with LCD on all the time) and have changed the battery only twice. I really can't put a quantittaive figure to the number of hours it gives me, but it's way better than I'd have expected of a digi-cam.
Manual control options (f/shutter speed/ISO/exp)
Quite Comprehensive manual controls with the follwoing settings:
Manual : Full control over all exposure settings, including shutter speed and lens aperture
Shutter-Speed Priority AE : control over shutter speed settings from 1/2000 to 15 seconds, aperture automatic. All other exposure settings are available.
Aperture Priority AE : control over lens aperture from f/2.8 to f/8.0 , shutter speed automatic. all other exposure settings are avilable .
Program AE: Shutter speed and lens aperture on auto, manual control over everything other stuff viz white balance, ISO, metering, exposure compensation,
Auto: All automatic. Use when feeling brain-dead
manual Focus mode: Not very intuitive to control but a good to have feature, Though the camera does a very good job at auto-focusing, it fails in cerain situations e.g. say there is a mirror behind the subject.
Pros: comprehensive Manual options, allows switching only certain manual options while leaving others at Auto
Cons: Non-intuitive manual focus options
Optical Zoom
Sweet 4 X zoom with a 5.8-23.2mm lens.
Pros: Nice 4X zoom compared to 3 for other competitiors, ability to attach standard external lenses after removing the lens ring
Cons: none i can think of
Other factors:
Other factors that don't fit into any of the categories above:
Pros: Uses 2 batteries, very effective AutoFocus, LCD actually displays the multiple focuspoints used for the evaluative focusing, or the single focus spot used for spot focusing.
Cons: No rechargeable included (only 2 alkaline) 16MB internal memory, laggy flash recharges, can't connect camera as disk drive (only PTP mode
transfers)
Conclusion: All in all, i feel that this am makes a very good reasonably priced buy for novice to amateur photographers. Given the fact that most of our pics are taken under lighthing conditions that are far from perfect (or even good), the excellent low light capabilities make it a very compelling buy.
However, the slight bulkiness and the lack of cool factor may put off some prospective buyers.
At the price paid (8000/-), i couldn't really have asked for better
and I am glad I picked this one.Disclaimer: The quantitative ratings for the battery life of S-90 and Nikon 4600 are based upon the value judgement i have based on what i have read on other sites & forums. I wasn't able to test the true battery life on the other 2 models.
The picture quality ratings for all 3 are based on snaps taken and reviewed by yours truly
... Post some indoor shots.
hyeah: