Canon PowerShot A3300 IS Review

By Howard Creech , DigitalCameraReview Staff | | 104526 Reads

Reviewer Rating:

Pros

Easy to use
Very good image quality
720p HD video

Cons

Tendency to overexpose
Flat contrast typical to class
Trouble viewing LCD outside

Quick Take:

The PowerShot A3300 covers basic picture-taking needs and then some with a good 4x zoom and decent 720p HD video.

At first glance Canon's new PowerShot A3300 IS doesn't look like the culmination of a century and a half of photographic progress, but it is. During the 19th century photographers captured images on large and very delicate glass plates loaded (one at a time) into very slow tripod mounted view cameras and viewed upside down under a dark hood before being manually exposed. When William Henry Jackson photographed Yellowstone National Park in the early 1870's he needed an enclosed wagon drawn by two mules to carry his photographic gear and portable darkroom.

In 1888 all that changed with the introduction of the inexpensive little Kodak "Brownie" roll film camera. The "Brownie" was simple to use, didn't have to be mounted on a tripod, and was (compared to what had come before) very compact. Automation made its first appearance in the sixties and auto focus in the eighties. The unrelenting march toward miniaturization and simplification continues to this day.

Today's pocket sized digital cameras like the A3300 IS can store hundreds of high resolution color images on an SD flash memory card the size of a postage stamp.

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