Snap happy - but it can be serious too

The Canon PowerShot G15 takes great pictures in automatic mode. Yet this is a camera designed for the serious photographer.

Although Canon PowerShot G15 has been designed for the serious photographer, its is also ideal for the snap-happy user. Sarah Dea / The National
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If you're anything like me, you'll pick up a gadget, put it in the automatic setting and start using it.

Luckily, the Canon PowerShot G15 takes great pictures in automatic mode and snap-happy users can crank out flattering shots of friends, sunsets and parties. Yet this is a camera designed for the serious photographer.

It is mid-way between a simple digital camera for an amateur and a digital single-lens reflex camera for the professional and has the world's first 50x optical zoom on a compact camera.

The PowerShot offers more advanced manual control options to satisfy the aspirations of budding photographers keen to tweak and twiddle with buttons to get the perfect shot. Users can adjust aperture, shutter speed, white balance and ISO sensitivity settings.

It has an f/1.8 aperture at its 28mm wide-angle, and an f/2.8 aperture at its maximum 140mm focal length, with a 7.1cm vari-angle PureColor II VA LCD screen.

Plus it has a pop-up flash.

While it has a quicker autofocus than its G12 predecessor (Canon says the new model is 53 per cent faster), it is notably slow when taking pictures in some modes.

It supports full HD movies, though it is quite fiddly to figure out how to get into video mode initially, but once you do it shoots 1080-pixel movies with decent sound quality.

For those too scared to play around with an advanced compact camera, the automatic setting is friendly enough as it picks out the optimal setting from 58 options, recognising the subtle lighting differences in the scene to adjust the camera to the right setting.

The camera's High Sensitivity System is intended to provide low-light performance, which it does brilliantly along with Dynamic Image Stabilisation to keep the blurry evening shots to a minimum too.

For a compact camera, it is on the bulky side, though it is nowhere near as big as a single-lens reflex camera. While it may not fit seamlessly into a pocket, it is small enough to carry around in a bag.

The Canon PowerShot G15 is priced at Dh2,499 (US$680).