Canon Powershot A650 IS Digital Camera With 12.1-Megapixel Resolution And 6x Zoom

Author's Rating:

Pros: Sharp photos, easy to use, high resolution, 6x optical stabilized zoom, features, AA batteries

Cons: Moderate chromatic aberration, uses 4 AA batteries

The Bottom Line: 
I like the A650 IS a lot. I am pleased with its resolution, sharp optics, zoom and image stabilization, features and performance. I highly recommended...

Author's Review
The Canon PowerShot A650 IS is a replacement for the last year’s 10-Megapixel Canon PowerShot A640. It features an upgrade to 12.1-Megapixel resolution, optical image stabilization, 6x optical zoom and other improvements.

While I have always liked the cameras of the A6 series (e.g. like A630 and A640), they were not perfect. They use 4 AA batteries, which I dislike. But now, with higher resolution than ever, more optical zoom and optical image stabilization, is the new A650 IS a perfect camera?

What is Canon PowerShot A650 IS?

The Canon PowerShot A650 IS is a 12.1-Megapixel compact digital camera with a 6x optical zoom (35-210 mm equivalent), optical image stabilization, large 2.5-inch articulated Vari-Angle LCD screen, zooming optical viewfinder and acclaimed Canon DiG!C III (Digic 3) Image Processor. It camera stores pictures on SD (Secure Digital), SDHC or MultiMedia memory cards (32 MB SD card supplied) and features USB 2.0 connection to PC and Mac computers.

The camera is powered by four AA batteries (four disposable alkaline AA batteries are supplied, rechargeable NiMH batteries are recommended). The camera is similar to the last year’s 10-Megapixel Canon A640, but has higher resolution, zoom range and an optical image stabilization.

Features

The Canon A650 IS features a 35-210 mm (in 35mm equivalent) optical zoom lens with maximum apertures f/2.8 (wide angle) - f/4.8 (telephoto). The shutter speed range is 15-1/2,000 sec.

The camera is powered by 4 AA-type batteries (NiMH rechargeable or Alkaline), which is the same arrangement as the other cameras of the A6xx line. Canon claims that the camera can take about 300 shots on alkaline batteries or 500 shots on AA NiMH rechargeable ones. I use high-capacity NiMH rechargeable batteries in my cameras whenever possible (where AA batteries are required) and used 2300 mAh NiMH batteries.

The camera features selectable Evaluative, Center-Weighted and Spot metering modes. The camera has a built-in flash with adjustable output and red-eye reduction mode. The camera has Auto, High ISO Auto or selectable ISO of 80-3,200 (ISO selection required in manual modes).

The camera also has a Macro mode, which can be engaged with a single push of a button. The same button allows you to engage manual focus mode.

The camera has exposure compensation, which you can engage easily to adjust exposure by +/- 2 stops in 1/3 stop increments. The available movie mode records movies at up to 640x480 with up to 30 fps frame rate with sound (lower resolutions and/or frame rates are available).

The camera can record images at up to 12.1-Megapixel resolution, which is very high for a compact digital camera. Available resolution modes include widescreen 16x9 aspect ratios as well. Each resolution mode can be combined with one of three compression modes: Normal, Fine or SuperFine.

The built-in flash features a selectable red-eye reduction mode as well as an ability to be disabled, enabled in automatic mode, force on and slow sync modes.

Getting Started

Just as with other Canon cameras, getting started with this camera is very easy and requires little effort, especially if you have used a digital camera before. I loaded four of my charged 2300 mAh Rayovac NiMH AA batteries and my SD memory card (the supplied 32-Megabyte memory card is too small and is only good for you to try out how the camera works or take a handful of pictures at full resolution).

Previous cameras of the A6xx series had separate battery and memory card doors and were designed to make sure you will not insert or remove the memory card while the camera is on. This could cause data corruption or a malfunction. If the camera was on and you opened the memory card door, the camera turned off. The new A650 uses a single door for batteries and the memory card.

The Canon A650 is good-looking camera. Its body is made of combination metal/polycarbonate and is half silver, half black. It is quite compact and convenient to hold. The camera itself is rather light for its size, but gains weight once loaded with four NiMH batteries (NiMH batteries are heavier than Alkaline batteries or most proprietary Li-Ion battery packs).

Build Quality

Although not as solid as the old A85, this camera is rather solidly built. The controls have good tactile response and effort.

Controls

The camera has an on/off button on the top deck as well as a zoom rocker, large shutter release button and a rotating mode wheel. The mode wheel can be set to Auto mode, Program mode, multiple scene modes as well as, more advanced, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Manual mode as well as Custom setting. Set it to Auto mode, and you can just point and shoot.

The bottom of the camera has a threaded tripod mount and a memory card/battery compartment lid. The rear houses a 2.5-inch LCD monitor that can be flipped out and rotated, an optical zooming viewfinder, a review/shoot switch and control buttons. The buttons are well-arranged and clearly marked.

The side has a cover, underneath which you can find a USB jack, A/V jack and a DC power input.

Operation

The camera has a retractable lens that extends and has a lens cover that opens when the camera is powered on. This does not happen if you turn the camera on in the review mode. The first time you power the camera on, it asks you to set the time and date. It is rather easy to do.

When the camera is powered off, the lens retracts and the lens cover closes. The camera takes less than 2 seconds to power on and can capture images at about 2-second intervals (when used with my Kingston Elite Pro SD memory card). The focusing takes less than a second and the shutter lag, when pre-focused, is almost unnoticeable.

The zooming from wide angle to telephoto (or back) takes about 2-3 seconds. It is rather responsive.

The LCD can be rotated so that it faces the back of the camera. In this position it is protected from impact and smudges. You obviously will have to rotate it so that it faces you to be able to use it.

Batteries

The camera can take more than 500 pictures on one charge of high-capacity NiMH batteries (I recommend at least 2100 mAh). I was able to take about 180 photos using my 2300 mAh NiMH batteries and the low battery warning has not appeared yet.

Although I do not generally like cameras that use 4 AA batteries, especially compact ones, the 2-AA cameras are very slow to recycle their flashes. So if you want better performance, especially indoors with flash, you either have to deal with 4 AA batteries (such as the A650 IS) or get a camera with a proprietary Li-Ion battery pack. There are people who do not mind the fact that the A6xx models use four, however.

Usage

The camera can be used in full auto mode (by rotating the mode dial to Auto position), where it is extremely easy to use. In this mode the camera sets all parameters automatically and you only have to point, shoot and enjoy the result.

The operation is as follows: you press the shutter release button halfway to make camera focus and the camera shows you (on the LCD screen) where it focused by displaying one or more green rectangles. Then you take the picture by pressing the shutter release button all the way.

You can go one step further and select an appropriate scene mode (e.g. Portrait, Landscape, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, Kids & Pets, etc.) to let camera know what effect you want. For example, in the Portrait mode the camera will try to keep the subject sharp while keeping the background blurry, but will try to keep both foreground and background sharp in the Landscape mode.

When you are ready to take control, you can use the Aperture Priority mode (to control how much of your picture will be in focus) or Shutter Priority mode (to freeze fast motion or, on contrary, create motion blur) or even full Manual mode to control both the Aperture and Shutter Speed.

Keep in mind that in most modes you can use Exposure Compensation to make pictures the camera takes brighter or darker (+/- 2EV in 1/3 EV steps).

Focusing

You can let camera focus using its AiAF multi-area focusing system and the camera will show you green rectangles over the areas where it focused so that you can confirm the focus areas. You can also switch to the 1-point focusing or use the manual focus capability, where the distance scale is shown (in your chosen units (cm or inches)) and the central portion of the screen is magnified to help you confirm focus easier.

The arrow down button switches the camera to Macro mode when pushed once, and to the manual mode when pushed again. Manual focusing is a little cumbersome but it works. In dim lighting the magnified portion can get pretty noisy, however, which makes focus more difficult to confirm.

Manual Mode

You can adjust both the aperture and shutter speed in the Manual mode. The camera shows you the under/overexposure as evaluated by the camera once the shutter button is half-pressed. You can also adjust the flash output in the manual mode. The ISO has to be set to a specific value on Manual, Aperture or Shutter Priority modes. Other modes let you select Auto ISO or Auto High ISO.

DIGIC III

The camera uses the newest version on DIGIC processor: DIGIC III. It is the same generation that is used in expensive Canon digital SLR cameras and it has been around for a while. It makes the camera fast in operation, responsive and helps it produce excellent pictures.

Ease of Use

The camera is very easy to use. I have not read the manual, but was able to use all of its features. If you have seen Canon menus before, your learning curve will be short or non-existent. And comparing to some other manufacturers (e.g. Fuji), the Canon menus are among the easiest to deal with.

LCD

The A650 IS uses a 2.5-inch LCD screen that feels very solid and well-built. The screen flips out and can be rotated in all directions. Its hinges feel very well-built. The amount of effort required to open, close or rotate the screen is a bit on the high side, but it gives impression of solidity.

The LCD screen itself features pleasing colors, has good visibility in sunlight and is very fluid in good light. It gains-up in dark environments (increases brightness) but gets a little noisy and less fluid. Still, it is useful in situations where LCD screens on other cameras would be of no use at all. And the camera has an optical zooming viewfinder as well.

The LCD coverage as about 100% - you can see exactly what will be recorded. The viewfinder, however, is tight and does not cover everything that will be recorded. This is typical for a compact digital camera like this one.

Computer Connectivity

The camera uses USB 2.0 connection to transfer pictures to a computer. It is located behind a lid on the side of the camera. Alternatively, you can also remove the SD memory card and use a memory card reader (if you have one), which I do. The transfer speed of the camera’s USB interface was about 1,500 KB/s.

Flash

The flash has an effective red-eye reduction mode and is sufficient at up to about 12 feet away. It has a recycle time of about 5-7 seconds (depending on output and battery status). I find the flash powerful enough for most indoor situations (at wide angle).

Image Quality Settings

The camera lets you select between Standard, Fine and Superfine compression levels (regardless of resolution). The Fine setting provides a good compromise between the file size and the image quality, but I suggest that you use SuperFine for photos you intend to enlarge seriously or crop before printing.

Picture Quality

I usually take photos that contain all primary colors at different focal lengths, apertures and compression ratios. Some photos are taken outdoors, some indoors with and without flash.

The photos I take features all colors: blue sky, green foliage, red curbs, yellow fire hydrant and cars of different colors.

Taking photos at different focal lengths and apertures reveals the camera's optical quality: corner sharpness, chromatic aberrations, overall sharpness.

Taking photos at different ISO settings shows how well a given camera can keep noise levels low in dim light. I mostly evaluate the image quality using my computer monitor, but I also print some photos at different sizes using either my printer or online services like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Costco's online photo center.

With 12.1-Megapixel resolution and sharp optics, the camera produces excellent photos that are very sharp, contrasty and have very pleasing colors. The automatic white balance worked very well outdoors and produced nice green foliage, sky and richly-saturated greens, reds and yellows. Although the colors are probably not very technically correct, they are very pleasing and will serve most consumers better than the technically correct ones.

The camera produces good detail level in both shadows and highlights. The pictures are very sharp and I can see very small detail such as individual blades of grass in the wide angle photos I took at a long distance from the lawn.

Just as with other recent Canon cameras, this model produces pleasing skin colors that are true to life and pleasing. And unlike some other cameras (including Canon SD Digital Elph series) that have noticeably softer edges of the frame, the photos taken with the A630 are sharp corner to corner with only very minor softening in the very corners.

The photos seem to have good dynamic range and preserve detail in both shadow and highlights well. I was able to find moderate amounts of chromatic aberration (purple fringing) in the areas of high contrast, mostly at full wide angle.

Usually, the smaller the camera and the higher the optical zoom it can provide, the softer the image becomes, especially at the corners of the frame as it is difficult to produce compact optics with high zoom levels. But the lens of the A650 is very good, despite its compact dimensions and the 6x power and produces sharp photos at all zoom levels.

Moreover, its optical image stabilization is very effective and allowed me to shoot at 2-3 stops slower shutter speeds than usually possible with non-stabilized cameras. That with no apparent battery life penalty.

Noise and Print Sizes

The noise is rather typical for a compact digital camera, albeit a bit higher than cameras with lower pixel count. The noise is absent at ISO 80 and appears at the ISO 100 in the shadows. It gets more pronounced at ISO 200 and gets worse at ISO 400, getting pretty bad by ISO 1,600. Still, if you are printing 6x4 or 5x7 pictures, the noise should not be visible up to (and including) ISO 1,600 and barely visible at ISO 400-800. And with 12.1-megapixel images this model produces, you can print your photos at up to 16x20 (ISO 80-100) or 11x14 inches with good detail (ISO 80-200).

The ISO 1,600 photos are barely usable at 6x4 and ISO 3,200 is unusable.

What I Like

I like the A650’s 6x optical zoom, its optical image stabilization, fast operation, ease of use and the excellent pictures it produces, as well as its high resolution. It has a lot of features and manual controls. It has good size and weight and excellent LCD screen. The battery life is excellent as well. And it uses widely available and inexpensive SD memory and standard AA batteries (alkaline or rechargeable NiMH).

What I Dislike

I usually prefer to have wider-angle lens (starting at 28mm), which is useful for indoor group photos or European-vacation architectural photos. And the use of 4 AA batteries is not necessarily my cup of tea, but majority of consumers digs it.

Recommendation

I like the A650 IS a lot. I am pleased with its resolution, sharp optics, zoom and image stabilization, features and performance. I highly recommended it if you need a capable compact camera that produces excellent photos with print sizes of up 16x20 inches or images with heavy cropping, has 6x zoom and uses 4 AA batteries.

The camera produces sharp, pleasantly-colored photos at large resolutions (up to 12.1 Megapixels). It provides the best of both worlds: point-and-shoot simplicity or full manual control and will be usable by any member of the family or photographers of all levels. I highly recommend it.