Canon PowerShot A4000 IS Overview

Posted: 03/08/2012

Fans of traveling light, yet not sacrificing on style and zoom reach: the Canon A4000 IS is aimed at you! Despite packing in a useful 8x optical zoom range, the Canon A4000 still has a fairly compact, attractive body. Better still, with a price tag of around US$200, it's not going to break the bank either.

The Canon A4000 IS' lens has a 35mm-equivalent focal range from a useful 28mm wide angle to a powerful 224mm telephoto. Maximum aperture falls from f/3.0 at wide angle to a rather dim f/5.9 at telephoto, but thankfully there's true optical image stabilization, as hinted at by the "IS" suffix on the camera's name.

Images and video are recorded using a 16 megapixel CCD image sensor. The ISO sensitivity range is fairly narrow, though, encompassing everything from ISO 100 to 1,600 equivalents. The maximum image dimensions are 4,608 x 3,456 pixels, and movies can be recorded at up to 1,280 x 720 pixel resolution, with a rate of 25 frames per second for high-def video, or 30 frames per second for standard-def.

On the rear panel of the Canon PowerShot A4000 is a 3.0-inch LCD panel with 230,000 dot resolution. That equates to about a QVGA (320 x 240 pixel) array, with each pixel comprised of separate red, green, and blue dots.

Images and movies are saved on Secure Digital cards, including the higher-capacity SDXC and SDHC types. Power comes courtesy of an NB-11L lithium ion battery pack, and the A4000 has a rated battery life of 175 shots. Connectivity includes USB 2.0 High Speed data, and a NTSC / PAL standard-def video output.

The Canon A4000 IS ships from February 2012 in the US market, in five different colors: black, silver, blue, red and pink.