Canon PowerShot A4000 IS Review

4.5

June 19, 2012 | Matt Grayson |

Buy a PowerShot A4000 IS 16 Megapixel Compact Camera - Silver (7.6 cm 3" LCD - 8x Optical Zoom - Optical IS - 4608 x 3456 Image - 1280 x 720 Video - PictBridge - HD Movie Mode)

Lowest Price: £114.00

Buy a PowerShot A4000 IS Silver Digital Camera (16 MP, 8x Opt, SD/SDHC/SDXC Card Slot)

Lowest Price: $99.00

Image Quality

All of the sample images in this Review were taken using the 16 megapixel Fine JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 4Mb.

Noise

At low ISO, image quality from the Canon PowerShot A4000 IS is great. In the highlights and mid tones there's no hint of noise and edge definition is marvellous. It's not perfect in shadow areas, there's a degree of smoothing out from the noise reduction system and evidence of black and white noise showing through. This is at full magnification though and looking at a picture normally shows no signs of any distress.

In fact, the image quality doesn't start to drop visibly until ISO 400 where colour noise becomes more aggressive in the darker areas. At ISO 800 JPEG artefacts are starting to peep out of the picture and make themselves known. Canon have capped the ISO settings to ISO 1600. It's a smart move because the flash is intelligent enough to cope with any darker situations.

ISO 100 (100% Crop)	ISO 200 (100% Crop)


ISO 400 (100% Crop)	ISO 800 (100% Crop)


ISO 1600 (100% Crop)

Sharpening

In our sharpness test, we think that on the whole the added sharpening from Adobe Photoshop did the picture some good but there were places where it looked too overdone.

Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)

Focal Range

The Canon Powershot A4000 IS has quite a versatile 8x optical zoom, as shown in the images below.

28mm	224mm

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberration is presentin the Canon PowerShot A4000 IS pictures but it shows up rarely and only on the high contrast edges.

Chromatic Aberrations 1 (100% Crop)	Chromatic Aberrations 2 (100% Crop)

Macro

At first glance, we were really impressed that Canon had put a 1cm macro facility on the A4000 IS. However in practice it's a different matter and our optimism soon dropped when we saw the picture results. The exact centre of the photographs is sharp but it drops off after leaving only a small circle of focus. The edges are extremely blurred to the point we thought we had a speed filter in front of the lens.

Macro	Macro (100% Crop)

Flash

With the flash off, the Canon PowerShot A4000 IS suffers from a little vignetting at wide-angle. The flash should ideally remove this but it serves to simply make it lighter. At full zoom there's no issues with vignetting with or without the flash.

Flash Off - Wide Angle (28mm)	Auto Flash - Wide Angle (28mm)


Flash Off - Telephoto (224mm)	Auto Flash - Telephoto (224mm)

Taking portraits, exposure using the flash leaves a natural result with no bleaching. However, with tiny amounts of red eye present, the red eye reduction struggles to get rid of it which is a problem in an otherwise flawless performance.

Flash On	Flash On (100% Crop)


Red-eye Correction	Red-eye Correction (100% Crop)

Night Shot

There's little difference in image quality between the program and night scene shot taken in the dark. However, choosing the Night scene mode will afford you a longer exposure if you need it. Noise is kept to a minimum though and images are lovely and sharp.