Buying a digital camera was always one of my dreams, and it came true recently. After zillions of searches in the net, I chose Canon A40.
It was a sort of compromise though, I had a very strict budget, wanted to restrict below $300 and had to buy accessories as well. The camera came for around $250. I don’t know how much it costs in India, but considering this was 6 months back, you should be able to get it for around 20k now. It came with a 8MB card, which I felt was never going to be sufficient. So I got another 64MB card for another $50. Overall, the decision proved to be good in the coming months.
The cam. Featured 3x optical and 2.5xdigital zoom, has an LCD display and can shoot pictures at 1600x1200 resolution at 2Mpixels. Photos were of very good quality. With digital printing charges at Chennai coming down to 6 per maxi sized print, it seems to be economical as well. Remember, it’s WYSIWIG (What You See is What You Get) and you could delete pictures on the fly until you are satisfied.
What more? Can also shoot movies for 10-20 seconds at a decent resolution (with sound), can directly print to some of the canon photo printers, has both auto and manual modes, can do some special effects (like sepia, vivid, b&w etc) comes bundled with all required & useful software. Never found any glitches in either the hardware or the software. Has only USB connectivity though. So if you have WinNT either upgrade or don’t go for this cam. Can connect directly to your TV as well.
Ok, now for the flipside. Power hungry, needs 4 AA-sized batteries, and needs them to be changed often. Suggest decent rechargeable batteries, otherwise going to lose what you save with not buying rolls. Manual modes bit tricky never got it right, auto mode is better. Low light shooting with flash switched off for some darker photos always resulted in a grainy picture, at least for me (I am not a professional, I may be wrong in this). Otherwise a decent buy.