Canon PowerShot A490

A good short-term camera. Life expectancy: 8 years – It provides very high quality images if you're willing to spend a lot on batteries. Someone bought this for $80.00 for me, plus I spent $70.00 on batteries for it, mostly Energizer, which is the best for these, bringing the net price of this up to $150.00 for the last 7 years. This is Year 8. The battery door broke in Year 5. Now it is malfunctioning: it turns on and off randomly, and it does so in spurts, which wasted the last $4.73 in batteries. It is dead.

Good – great value for money - highly rated and frequently recommended by many professional review sites as number 1 pick for value for money. Although I was amazed it kept working after being dropped in a bucket of water (and careful cold air blow drying), it did glitch up the date memory requiring resetting most times I turned it on, so I've just replaced it with the next model up, the A495 at $68 from OfficeWorks. Almost the same, just a couple of extra small options - either is recommended. cheap, good, reliable, low battery consumption, good auto/macro down to 2cm distance, fast startup 2 secs (compared to 7 seconds for my old Nikon s52), good sealing(lens closes to prevent scratching; I dropped this sucker in a bucket of water and it kept working!), I carried it everywhere in my pocket to grab shots of any passing scene. slow shot-to-shot times 5-7 seconds(not a biggie for me) - not sure about the extra THM files that wouldn't be recognised by my PC viewer programs.

Although I loved this camera I paid $88 for, I did notice that $400 cameras took better photos, particularly in difficult/backlit situations, but I see better value in getting a cheap newer technology camera every year or two than in worrying about losing/damaging my expensive item.