Canon Powershot A710IS: Brings You Closer to Where You Want to Be!

I am an admitted Canon fan. Specifically, when it comes to their Powershot A series, I have owned a number of them. I started out with their initial model, the A20, then progressed through the A40, A70, A75, A540, most recently the A570 IS and now I have arrived at the A710 IS. It combines many of the controllable features of larger, more traditional (SLR 35mm) cameras, yet is light (weighing in at just over 8 ounces), doesn't use film (media is a SD or, if you prefer high capacity as I do, a SDHC card), has a nice 6X Optical Zoom, maintains a viewfinder that is especially useful on bright days when the large LCD screen is difficult to see, is easy to handle per it's ergonomic design and is priced at only a tad more than my previous Powershot A570 IS and improves on it by increasing the power of the Optical Zoom by a full 50% - from 4X to 6X. Ultimately, it was this singular difference that caused me to decide to resell the A570 that I had owned and used for only a few weeks, and 'upgrade' myself to this model.

Why Is The Optical Zoom So Important?
The Optical Zoom is the feature that makes things look closer than they really are and allows you to take pictures of things at a distance that look like you were standing much closer to them when you took the picture. For clarity's sake, there are two kinds of zoom capacities on most digital cameras - Optical and Digital. The Optical zoom is accomplished by lens magnification and tends, with good lenses, to be clean and sharp. The Digital zoom capacity, on the other hand, is actually the appearance of magnification achieved through electronic manipulation of the digital image 'seen' by the camera. Generally speaking, the Digital zoom is not a useful feature as it tends, in most instances, to distort or "fuzzy up" the image as it artificially alters its seeming magnification. Many photographers, me included, elect to disable this feature. I am dwelling on this because it is a particularly important feature to me.