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DPInterface Canon PowerShot A640 Review
Brad Soo - January 7th, 2006
The Canon PowerShot A640 is everything the A630 is with higher resolution, remote shooting capability and a black colored body. Yup, that's what the $40 difference buys you. And slightly slower continuous shooting too. Let's see if the A640 stacks up well against other cameras now.
Canon A-series comparison
Here's a nice and helpful comparison table of the five A-series cameras that Canon has released this year:
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*As of January 7th, 2007
Size and Weight
(197.6) 90.4 x 64.0 x 43.2 mm (170 g) - Canon PowerShot A530/A540
(224.4) 109.4 x 66.0 x 49.0 mm (245 g) - Canon PowerShot A630/A640
(205.2) 97.5 x 66.5 x 41.2 mm (210 g) - Canon PowerShot A710 IS
(177.2) 92.7 x 56.7 x 27.8 mm (155 g) - Fujifilm FinePix F31fd
(196.1) 104.7 x 60.6 x 30.8 mm (170 g) - Fujifilm FinePix F650
(177.8) 91.0 x 57.0 x 29.8 mm (170 g) - HP Photosmart R817/818
(190.1) 90.5 x 63.0 x 36.6 mm (177 g) - Kodak EasyShare C875
(177.5) 97.0 x 61.0 x 45.0 mm (170 g) - Nikon Coolpix L5
(203.0) 97.5 x 59.0 x 27.0 mm (155 g) - Olympus FE200
(207.0) 100.0 x 62.0 x 45.0 mm (186 g) - Panasonic Lumix LZ3/LZ5
(174.0) 89.0 x 60.0 x 25.0 mm (120 g) - Pentax Optio M20
(185.0) 96.8 x 61.8 x 26.4 mm (136 g) - Samsung Digimax S600
(169.0) 89.0 x 57.0 x 23.0 mm (127 g) - Sony Cyber-shot W70
(179.6) 94.2 x 60.6 x 24.8 mm (161 g) - Sony Cyber-shot W100
The Canon PowerShot A630/A640 are the largest cameras in the group. The A630/A640 pair are midsized cameras, which are bigger than typical compacts but not as huge as you think. They certainly can't fit into your pocket without a struggle but should go into purses, bags and larger pockets with ease.
Open up the Box
The Canon PowerShot A640 includes an average bundle:
- 32 MB MultiMedia Card
- 4 AA batteries (non-rechargeable)
- Wrist strap
- USB cable
- A/V cable
- CD-ROM
Storage and Power
The included memory card (though larger than on the A630) is still as useless with the A640 having 10 megapixels. I'd recommend getting at least a 1 GB high-speed (around 60X) SD card. The camera takes advantage of high-speed cards and the performance increase is noticeable. The A640 supports SDHC cards as well (above 2 GB).
360 shots - Canon PowerShot A530/A540
500 shots - Canon PowerShot A630/A640
360 shots - Canon PowerShot A710 IS
580 shots - Fujifilm FinePix F31fd
150 shots - Fujifilm FinePix F650
200 shots - HP Photosmart R817/818
250 shots - Kodak EasyShare C875
250 shots - Nikon Coolpix L5
290 shots - Olympus FE200
390 shots - Panasonic Lumix LZ3/LZ5
640 shots - Pentax Optio M20
N/A - Samsung Digimax S600
390 shots - Sony Cyber-shot W70
360 shots - Sony Cyber-shot W100
The Canon PowerShot A640 maintains the great battery life of 500 shots per charge (CIPA Standard) despite the increase in LCD size. The only cameras which outdo the A630/A640 twins are the Fujifilm F31 and Pentax M20.
Oh, and since the included batteries are throwaway ones, you'd wanna get a set of 4 or 8 NiMH rechargeable batteries and a quick 15 minute charger.
Extras
As with the other A-series PowerShot cameras, the A640 is quite expandable:
- Conversion lens adapter
- Wide-angle conversion lens (0.7x, 25 - 98 mm)
- Telephoto conversion lens (1.75x, 61 - 245 mm)
- Close-up conversion lens (Minimum focus distance: 4 cm [W]/14 cm [T])
- Various 58 mm filters
- Waterproof case
- External slave flash
- AC adapter
- Set of batteries
In addition to that, the A640 can be controlled from your computer via USB for remote shooting. Neither the A630 or A710 IS have this feature.
Camera Tour
The Canon PowerShot A640 feels solid and not "cheap". The camera has a grip and all the controls are on the right side, making one hand shooting easy. You'll be hard pressed to find any design differences between this camera and the A630 - there share essentially the same body (Except color). The A640 has a black colored body which makes it look more serious than the previous A-series cameras. Should I note that the A640 is the first A-series camera to come in an all-black finish (when's that gonna happen to the Digital ELPHs?).
The Canon A640 has a 4X zoom lens equivalent to 35 - 140 mm. The aperture range is f2.8 - f4.1, which is faster than on most cameras. On the bottom right is a button to eject the ring around the lens and put on the conversion lens adapter.
To the upper right, there's a fairly powerful flash unit which has a range of 45 cm to 4.2 m at wide-angle and up to 3.0 m at telephoto. The AF-assist/self-timer lamp and optical viewfinder are located to the left of the flash. And just below the "Canon" logo is the microphone.
The Canon PowerShot A640 features a rotating 2.5 inch LCD just like the A630. The photo above shows the 8 megapixel A630 and its LCD.
The A640 has a 2.5 inch LCD that can flip out and rotate forwards for self portraits or down for overhead shots. The resolution is still on the low side with 115,000 pixels but it's not noticeable. Visibility was good in both outdoor and low-light conditions.
Above the LCD, there's a tiny optical viewfinder with 2 status lights beside it. It proved useful when I wanted to take a quick shot, conserve batteries and also make picture taking less conspicuous (somehow that's true).
Then there's all the other controls on the right side of the camera. The mode switch moves the camera between shooting and playback. Next is the exposure compensation/delete photo button and print button. The print button lights up when the camera is connected to the printer.
A directional controller gives you quick access to some functions:
- Up - Flash setting (Auto, on, slow-sync, off - redeye reduction turned on/off in the menu)/Jump (Go ahead/back: 10 images, 100 images, next shot date, movie, folder, category)
- Down - Focus setting (Normal, macro, manual focus)
- Left/right - Changing exposure settings
The FUNCtion button brings up a screen with almost all the settings you'll need including (this is only for program mode - in auto or any scene mode, then most of the settings will be locked up):
- ISO (Auto, high auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, 800)
- White balance (Auto, daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, fluorescent H, underwater, custom)
- Drive mode (Single shot, continuous, self-timer 2 or 10 seconds, custom timer)
- My Colors (Off, vivid, neutral, sepia, monochrome, positive film, lighter/darker skin tone, vivid red, vivid green, vivid blue, custom color)
- Flash exposure compensation/flash output in manual mode
- Metering method (Evaluative, center weighted, spot)
- Still image size and compression
The custom color option allows you to change red, green, blue and skin tone values as well as sharpness, contrast and saturation. In menus, the FUNCtion button doubles as the SET or okay button.
The DISPlay button toggles the amount of information displayed when shooting or playing back and can turn the LCD off while shooting so you can use the viewfinder. Holding down that button will push LCD backlighting to its maximum setting. The MENU button brings up a menu with other camera settings you won't be changing as often.
Up here, there's a power button, shutter button with a wrapped around zoom lever and a speaker. But the thing you'd want to check out over here is the mode dial:
- Custom - Stores a set of your preferred settings
- Manual mode - Full access to all settings and exposure control. Some of the faster shutter speeds can only be used with smaller apertures though
- Aperture priority - Choose an aperture value between f2.8/f4.1 and f8.0
- Shutter priority - Choose a shutter speed between 15 seconds and 1/2500th second
- Program - Auto exposure but other settings are accessible
- Auto - The camera does everything for you
- Portrait scene mode
- Landscape scene mode
- Night portrait scene mode
- Other scene modes (Foliage, snow, beach, fireworks, underwater, indoor, kids & pets, night snapshot, color accent, color swap)
- Stitch assist - Take several photos and combine them into a single panorama (using the included software)
- Movie mode
On one side of the camera, there's USB 2.0 High Speed, DC-IN and A/V Out ports while the other side is left blank.
At the bottom of the A640, there's a plastic tripod mount and battery/memory card compartment. The door is fairly sturdy here although the batteries lack a latch/lock to secure them into place while swapping memory cards.
Shooting
The A640 displays a lot of shooting information on its display including exposure data although there's still no live histogram. The Canon A640 also lacks the Face Detection autofocus feature, which is found on the DIGIC III cameras such as the G7.
You can select one of the Canon PowerShot A640's many image resolutions which include 8 megapixels (with a widescreen 16:9 and print 3:2 option) to VGA plus three compression options - Superfine, Fine and Normal. I find that most users (not only me) normally use full resolution with Fine for everyday shooting and SuperFine only for very important shots.
The A640 has a 1 cm macro mode, so you can get really close to your subject. The A640 also features a full suite of manual controls - the manual exposure modes I mentioned earlier as well as things like custom white balance.
Recording
Featuring the same movie mode as the A630, the Canon PowerShot A640 takes VGA movies with sound at 30 FPS till the memory card fills up. Each movie clip is limited to 1 GB which is around 8 to 9 minutes.
If you want to record longer clips, the frame rate is selectable with 30 FPS or 15 FPS. You can lower the resolution down to QVGA (320 x 240) as well. A 160 x 120 option records tiny movies for e-mail at 15 FPS up to 3 minutes.
Exposure is automatically adjusted while recording while focus is fixed and only digital zoom can be used while recording. Movie quality was overall quite good, as with the other Canon cameras.
Performance
The Canon PowerShot A640 starts up quickly in a little over a second. The A640 normally takes about 1/4 to 1/2 second at telephoto. Low-light focusing was excellent with the AF-assist beam.
Shutter lag is not obvious at all except at telephoto in low-light. Shot-to-shot speed was at a rate of 1 shot every 1.6 seconds (versus 1.3 on A630), longer if the flash is used. Flash recharge time using a fully charged set of NiMH batteries took 2 seconds. The camera zooms from wide-angle to telephoto within 1.7 seconds with very few stops in between (only eight).
In continuous shooting, the Canon A640 can shoot indefinitely at 1.5 FPS till the memory card fills up - provided you have a high-speed card. That's not bad, for an extra 2 megapixels, you shoot at 0.2 FPS slower. The LCD refreshes many times but only to show the last shot taken which makes it difficult to catch fast moving subjects - you'd wanna use that viewfinder to track moving subjects.
The A640 powers down quickly within 2 seconds with the lens at telephoto. The Canon A640 feels fairly fast and comparable even to some of Canon's DIGIC III cameras.
Image Quality
Time to take a look to see how the Canon PowerShot A640 fares in image quality:
ISO 80 (f4.1, 1/400 sec)
ISO 100 (f4.1, 1/500 sec)
ISO 200 (f4.1, 1/1000 sec)
ISO 400 (f4.1, 1/1250 sec)
ISO 800 (f8.0, 1/1250 sec)
Noise levels are low at ISO 80 and ISO 100. At ISO 200, the noise goes up but still looking clean. You'll need little noise reduction at ISO 400 and quite a bit more at ISO 800. There's low levels chromatic aberration (color fringing) in the shots taken by the A640. Barrel distortion and redeye are noticeable while pincushion distortion is not.
Image quality is very good on the A640 and very surprisingly, noise levels were lower on the A640 versus the lower pixel count A630!
Photo gallery
All the photos in the Canon PowerShot A640 photo gallery.
Playback
In playback, the Canon PowerShot A640 can playback stills and movies (With sound) as well as: Protect image, print marking, sound memo, slideshow, rotate and simple movie editing. You can also magnify still photos by 10x and take a look around using the 4 arrow buttons as well as post-process photos with the My Colors features from the FUNCtion menu. The Canon PowerShot A630 shows complete info, including a histogram and exposure data.
Conclusion
The Canon PowerShot A640 is the same nice camera you get with the A630. It has 10 megapixels, a rotating 2.5 inch LCD and full manual controls. The A640 has great battery life, a nice grip with easy one hand operation, very good performance, even a custom option on the mode dial and now, remote shooting via your PC.
Then the A640 also shares the same quibbles as the very similar A630: low LCD resolution, no live histogram and a plastic tripod mount. The movie mode is excellent save for the per clip limit and inability to focus and optical zoom. Image quality, especially in terms of noise, was better than the A630.
Yes, I'd definitely recommend the A640. The performance drop caused by the higher resolution is not significant, in fact barely noticeable and in my opinion, the slightly better image quality and higher resolution justifies the extra $40. Of course that's subjective, you could go with the cheaper A630 if you don't need that extra resolution or remote shooting.
Camera rating upon 10 (more about this): [Category: Mid-range]
- 8.0 - Body/Exterior
- 6.0 - Bundle, batteries and memory
- 7.5 - Lens
- 8.0 - Feature set
- 8.5 - Controls and operation
- 8.0 - Performance
- 8.5 - Image quality
- 7.8 - Overall rating
What's hot:
- Excellent value for money
- Long battery life with rechargeable batteries
- Good ergonomics; custom option on mode dial
- Large rotating LCD with good visibility
- Full manual controls
- Remote shooting via USB
- Unlimited continuous shooting and great movie mode
- Fast operation
- Above average image quality with low noise
What's not:
- Low LCD resolution
- No live histogram and plastic tripod mount
- No movie focus or optical zoom, limited to 1 GB (about 8 minutes) per clip
- Larger memory card and rechargeable batteries not included
Recommended Accessories
- 1 GB high-speed Secure Digital card
- A set of 4 rechargeable AA NiMH batteries with a fast 15 minute charger
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