2. Main Characteristics

Viewfinder, Focusing, And Optics

The A620 has an optical viewfinder that you may find preferable to using the display screen under certain conditions, but keep in mind that it's not totally accurate. It has two indicator lights that tell you whether shooting conditions are right without having to take your eye off the subject. Naturally, you'll take most shots using the LCD display, which offers more precise framing and many indicators to help you refine your settings. The 2" screen tilts and swivels in all directions, which is very useful; it lets you shoot in various positions, including at ground level or over the heads of a crowd, for example. The screen also folds down into its housing in the body of the camera, ensuring complete protection when you're moving around.

Focusing has all the functions you could expect, with autofocus on nine points that can be selected automatically by the camera (AiAF), manually by the user, or can be limited to the central area. Added to these functions is a particularly well-designed manual focus capability with a "magnifier" function that activates automatically for the central part of the image. This is one manual focus that's usable not only in theory, but also in practice!

The zoom lens covers the traditional range of focal lengths one normally finds on digicams: the 35mm SLR equivalent of 35 to 140 mm. It is nice and bright at its shortest focal length and loses very little brightness (less than one stop) when you move to the maximum focal length; that's better than most of its competitors. Naturally you could complain that the shortest focal length isn't a true wide angle, but that's the rule for this category of camera. Wide angle and telephoto converters are available as accessories, though that idea seems a little obsolete to us.

The macro capabilities of this unit are very good, with focusing possible as close as 0.4" (1 cm) from the lens in wide-angle mode. The minimum focusing distance increases with the focal length to 9.8" (25 cm) at the maximum focal length. That's still very good, since the field of view covered is around 2.8" x 2" (7 cm x 5 cm).