Canon PowerShot A85 review

The A85 is Canon's latest point-and-shoot digital camera.

It's not the cheapest around, but £180 buys you a 4-million pixel camera that's bristling with features. With so many bells and whistles, we were hoping the A85 would be simple to operate. Fortunately, it is.

A dial on the top of the camera provides instant access to the most popular modes for taking pictures. The fully automatic mode is clearly marked, so if you simply want to point the camera and press the button, you'll have no problems. For more creative photography, the A85 lets you adjust both shutter and aperture settings manually, giving you compete control over the exposure. You can also set either the aperture or shutter priority and leave the camera to work out the corresponding setting.

For those who want to achieve a particular look for their picture, but don't know how, there's a range of pre-defined picture modes. Portrait mode is best for head-and-shoulders pictures, while Landscape mode ensures that the A85 won't focus on the nearest object to the camera, ruining your sunset scene. There are 13 preset modes, so no situation should prove too taxing for the A85.

A 32MB Compact Flash memory card is supplied as standard, which will hold 27 images at the camera's highest resolution. Picture quality is very good, even in low light situations where the flash is required. Colours are accurate, and fleshtones in portraits are very natural. The A85 can also record low-quality video clips with sound, though the audio lacks bass and sounds tinny.

Unless you have particularly small mitts, the A85's chunky hand grip makes it very comfortable to hold. Your fingers rest naturally on the zoom toggle and shutter release button. All in all, it's a very easy camera to use.

The Canon has one problem, however - and unfortunately it's a serious one. The time the camera takes to record a picture from the moment you press the shutter release button (known as 'shutter lag') is unacceptably long. The A85 can take as long as three seconds to take a photo. That's about 1.5 seconds longer than the the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P43, reviewed on page 80.

As good as the A85 is, its image quality is no better than that of our current Top 50 favourite, the Fuji F700 - and the F700 offers an even greater degree of manual control. The A85 falls just short of getting an award.