Make no mistake–I love Canon hardware.  Canon cameras do a terrific job for me and do so with controls that are, generally, easy to work with.  Some Canons are better than others, of course, and not all of them represent the kind of value that you can get elsewhere.  Today we’re talking about a bit lesser in the market, the Canon A3000.

The Canon A3000 is a ten megapixel camera that boasts a 4x optical zoom, with 4x digital zoom to assist.  It also features a 2.7 inch LCD display, DIGIC III image processor, a variety of shooting modes and white balance modes, the Smart AUTO mode that makes optimal setting selections for you, through-the-lens autofocus, burst shooting mode, built-in auto flash, a variety of special effects, video shooting capability (VGA or QVGA), support for a variety of memory cards including Secure Digital and MultiMediaCard, and direct printing capability.

This is a hard one to make a call on, frankly.  Ten megapixel is a little short as far as resolution goes, but the zoom here is pretty good for a compact digital camera.  Plus there are plenty of great options to really give this some utility, and the controls are indeed far from terrible.  The sticking point here, however, is the price–at a hundred and fifty bucks, I’ve seen some twelve and even fourteen megapixel cameras that would catch my interest a whole lot sooner than this Canon would.

Still though, I have seen vastly worse, and if the Canon A3000 comes down even just twenty dollars or so in price it will make a good buy indeed.  For right now, I’d suggest you look elsewhere, but if you have some time to wait before your next purchase, if this goes on sale you’ll get a good find indeed.