Canon- Delighting you Always..

Well, that tag line seems to have come true in its full form. This week, Canon India replaced my 3 year old well-worn Powershot A70, that was having trouble with its CCD Module, with a brand new Powershot A530.

Well, You could argue that Canon sold me a defective product in the first place itself. Well, thats kind of true. My A70, along with those of a lot of folks out there somewhere on the internet, has a defective CCD Module that seems to give a "purple display" issue, as it is widely known in some forums. Still, I had been using my A70 for a good part of 3+ years. It was just a few months back that this problem started.

To be true, I had given all hopes on it. In todays times, it is overwhelmingly expensive to get a gadget repaired, specially getting a key component replaced. It was a just routine search on the net, that gave me some hope, that of free repair of the CCD sensor by Canon folks. This was verified with the local Canon Authorised Service Centre here.

I left my camera with them nearly 3 months back, expecting to receive the repaired camera (with a replaced CCD mod.) in about 2 weeks. 2 weeks stretched to 2 months, with the Service Centre folks updating me that the CCD Sensor array of 3 Megapixel is in shortage, no new cameras using those kinds being the reason. I thought that was the last I would be hearing about it. And it was kinda true...

Anyway, A530 looks quite similar to A70, with minor look and feel changes. The major plusses are : 5 megapixel Sensor array, 4x Optical zoom (compared to 3x of A70) and its need of only 2 AA sized batteries rather than 4 for A70.
There are a few minusses as well. Its got an inferior movie mode with VGA (640x480) resolution movies with only 10 fps (frames per second) instead of the regulation 30 for A70. Moreover, I would need to buy the newer format SD Memory card for it, since A70 used Compact Flash.

All in all, I am happy. First of all to see my pint sized camera back in action, only a notch better this time. And then its brand new, and hopefully, if I am lucky, it should last me a while.

Its adequately fast and has reasonable picture quality. Some pictures will come in this post, that I shot with the A530. Only, Blogger is bugging right now.