Canon PowerShot A95 review

Like its predecessor the Canon PowerShot A85, the A95 is well laid-out, with all controls within easy reach.

The zoom control is located conveniently around the shutter button, and the LCD screen swivels so that you can see it from any angle. It then folds neatly and safely away when you've finished with it. Our only misgiving is that the camera is rather heavy when loaded with batteries.

If you just want to point and shoot, the A95 has a reliable, fully automatic mode as well as a broad range of subject-specific shooting modes (designed to take night scenes, landscapes and portraits, for instance). You can select these quickly and easily using the dial on top of the camera. There's no need to hunt through concealed menus on the LCD screen, as there is in some of the A95's competitors.

For those wanting extra control the A95 has manual focus, a range of metering patterns, a customisable white balance control (which alters the way colours are recorded to compensate for difficult lighting conditions) and a number of auto-focus patterns. These are all features that, until recently, you would have expected to find only on really posh cameras. The only criticism of shooting in manual focus is the relatively short aperture range. A camera's aperture is the circular opening inside the lens that controls the amount of light hitting the camera's CCD sensor. Its size is measured in 'F stops': the larger the number, the smaller the aperture, enabling more of the shot to be in focus at once. The A95 goes down to an aperture of just F.8. We'd have preferred a greater range.

Pictures taken with the A95 have lots of detail and minimal noise (speckled interference) even in areas of shadow. Flexible image quality controls provide five resolution settings and three levels of compression. Those five million pixels allow you to take more detailed pictures with sufficient resolution to do them justice. Good flash coverage means that indoor images are sharp with natural colour and well-judged exposure. Like most compact cameras the A95 doesn't capture a full range of brightness, so detail in really bright areas of outdoor shots can get bleached out. Our other major misgiving was the slow recovery time between shots, which could cause you to miss that vital moment.

The A95 is a good compact camera, but it doesn't have enough of an edge over our current Top 50, the much cheaper Fuji F700, to win an award.