I had bought my Canon Powershot A720 IS in May 2008 for around 9K through ebay. I selected Canon after comparing the photos taken with Sony/Nikon digital cameras. I would definitely say that Canon is the best in color reproduction and the clarity and crispness in the photos.
I was impressed with the number of shots I could take with a pair of fully charged rechargeable batteries. It was around 400 with a good number of photos along with flash. The 6X zoom is impressive provided you dont jerk your arm while clicking. In the wide end also, it accomodated quite a number of people at closer range shots.
I found the flash recycle time to be a bit slow. But what can you expect with AA type rechargeable batteries? But this drwaback is countered by the number of shots which can be taken with a AA rechargeable which is far far more than that of a box type compact Ni-Cadmium rechargeable battery.
We can toy around with various controls of the camera due to the presence of manual settings like exposure control, flash intensity, flash speed, aperture control, shutter speed, ISO speed, etc. It’s not an SLR but still we have all these features which will not be even used/found out by most of the casual first time photographers.
I had compared the shots taken with my Canon and a Sony Cybershot(W-50 or some model). The color reproduction on the Sony was not upto the mark. The A720 got it correct. The Sony tried to artificialise the scene, kind of making it artificially more sharp and crisp instead of getting the real scene in good color and lighting. Without flash, the shots on the Sony sucked. The manual control of the Canon came to rescue here. By adjusting the shutter speed/exposure/ISO we can get the scene captured without a flash, in its own glory. I personally like to get scenes captured in the natural setting rather than with a flash.
The LCD of the A720 is having less pixels but I felt we could easliy review the pictures on this screen. The histogram is not a live one but we can review the picture just after taking it. The picture taken can be kept on the screen by pressing the set/fucntion button just after taking a shot. This wasy we can review it then n there itself.
Overall I think this is a good all-rounder camera. The video is also somewhat good with 30 fps and longplay which is a boon for saving card space. The successor for A720, ie A590/580, is much lighter and faster. But it loses out on the zoom(only 4X) and the video frame rate is reduced(20 fps). Anyway I’m more than satisfied with the photos taken with this camera.