Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Simply Terrific
If you are looking for an inexpensive camera that takes excellent, versatile photos and is very easy to use, I have not seen a better one. I have been a semi-professional photographer since the late-60's but refuse to carry expensive gear on vacations or weekend trips. The Canon slips into my front pocket; is unobtrusive; and, is sufficiently rugged to endure most environments. The photo quality is very good and the zoom is quick and efficient. Since most of my travel is in Asia where expensive items tend to vanish on occasion, my only concern using this camera is safeguarding the exposed film. The camera, at this price, can easily be replaced. This is a good product. It should serve you well.
Rating: - very good optics for this price; average electronics
I had experience with several cameras ranging from small point-and-shoot to SLRs, and I observed that zoom lenses have to be fairly expensive to provide decent image quality. Indeed, a zoom lens is usually more complicated than a lens with single focal length since it contains more elements, and it also requires accurate mechnics. This Canon seems to break this rule. The quality of pictures taken with this camera in daylight conditions is suprisingly good for the price. It is certainly on par with more expensive pocket cameras, and rivals low-end SLRs (i.e., priced below $500). The other advantages of this camera is that it is fairly light and small and the controls are extremely simple (off, auto-flash mode, red-eye reduction, fill-in flash, and no flash + two buttons to control zoom). The negative side of this camera is poor flash performance. It seems that the electronics built into it cannot properly determine how much energy should be send to the flash (or maybe it does not have variable flash power at all). The result is that a portrait taken in twighlights will be overexposed if the person is to close to the camera, and underexposed if he/she is too far. My daugher took quite a few pictures in the dark lately, and hardly any came out right. Further drawbacks are somewhat cheap look, sluggish zoom motor, and poor quality of paint on the program wheel (it started peeling off way too quickly). There is also no pre-programmed modes which more sophisticated cameras offer (such as portrait mode, night shooting, landscape, sports (quickly moving objects), etc.) The bottomline is that in terms of the feel of the camera and its electronics you get pretty much what you would expect to get for this kind of money; in terms of optics, you get a very good deal. If you are looking for a small camera with wide-range zoom that can take sharp pictures, and do not want to spend several hundred dollars for high-end models, this Canon is likely to be the best deal on the market. I rated it five stars for its price/value ratio. There is another version of the same camera available ..., with quartz date. My opinion that the price difference between the two is much more than that feature is worth.
Rating: - a decent camera with exotic film demands
We bought this camera after Consumer Reports gave it a Best Buy rating, and because we'd had an older Canon SureShot which had recently died after 7 years of very good service.I was initially disturbed to find that the camera requires DX-coded film. I usually order my film from a mail order supplier and they do not carry DX film which, from what I've been able to discover, means that there is more information bar coded onto the canister. This I could live without. However, the manual tells you that it's possible to use regular film though it may be a little more difficult to load, and furthermore it will always register as ISO 25 (not 100 or 200 or 400)! I was pretty unhappy about all this. We bought some DX film and had it developed, taking pictures in many different circumstances -- indoors/outdoors, with/without flash, articial/natural light, etc. The results were very good in all conditions.
Next, we loaded regular Kodak film (ISO 200). I could not get the film to load. I placed the reel in with various lengths of film exposed but that didn't help. I tried to depress the shutter button as recommended in the manual, but that did not help. My husband got the film to load on the first try. (I believe this is because I had warmed it up for him.) Again we took pictures in many circumstances and the quality, surprisingly, was fine. The features offered work well. The manual is good. Also, the battery is much more reasonable than previous batteries, which cost about [price]. I would say the only problem withe this camera, as with its predecessor, is a sluggish zoom mechanism. A very good camera at a good price.
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