Living with my Canon A570 IS

If you saw my earlier post about buying a new pocket P&S digicam, you'd know that I have had this camera for about a month and a half now. Any camera of the complexity of today's digicams has many features, and of course, a learning curve, as well as some time to get comfortable with a new toy. Having taken the Canon A570 along on several trips, as well as carrying it daily, I feel that I certainly made the right choice. I still like the optical viewfinder, and the menus are pretty easy to navigate, once accustomed to accessing them frequently to change settings. I have been shooting a fair amount of film lately, and having this camera along as a supplement to using various crappy cameras as well as good 35mm and medium format equipment gives me another creative tool. It also requires little space in my bag or pocket when I'm toting around a bunch of film cameras.



The other half of the equation is the really nice Canon software. It is easy to use, puts new images in folders by date, and allows me to edit and do some simple things with the Canon software, or go into Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 as my editor. By the way, if one program can make me purchase a PC over a Mac, PSP X2 is it. I love its feature set, and it makes a lot of things a one-click option to accomplish... such as putting a border around an image. It's on my Dell Laptop, and I wish there was a Mac version to run on my Mac mini... which I just replaced the hard disk within. That was not as hard as I thought it would be, but I still ended up reinstalling the system and some applications. My old disk was fried, for sure -- but I did have all my apps and files backed up.