When I started camera shopping back in June I had very few solid criteria. I had general specs that I was looking for (at least 5MP, 3X zoom) but was really most interested in the coolness factors and what I could afford. So with few set in stone criteria and a budget that included several popular price points there were lots of cameras that fell into the sweet spot. It was a bit overwhelming.

So I started looking for imformation in obvious places like dpreview.com and personal reviews at Amazon. I didn't find the information at dpreview particularly helpful for me personally because a lot of it was more in depth and more technical than I was ready to deal with at the time. And the sample galleries, while showing a lot of things the camera could do, had a lot of not great shots that could be attributed maybe to the camera but also maybe to the photographer. While it's probably better to see a mixture of good and bad shots taken with the same camera I was still mostly interested in cool stuff at this point so I wanted to see lots of good shots. Amazon helped a lot in this area. It seems that people uploaded their best shots to Amazon both to show off the camera's attributes and their own skills as photographers.

I should also mention that at this point in my search I had already decided that eventually I wanted to purchase a digital slr and would be choosing a camera manufacturer for the future and not just a camera for now. Meaning that the pretty obvious choices to me for a quality, affordable dslr are Canon and Nikon so I wanted the point and shoot camera I was buying now to be either a Canon or Nikon. So while simultaneously checking out Canon and Nikon p&s cameras I was also checking out dslr cameras from the same companies. Eventually I settled on the Canon line of cameras. This obviously helped narrow my choices down in the point and shoot category.

As I mentioned Amazon had some great photos taken with various cameras that users/reviewers had uploaded. Enough anyway to put the A95 at the top of my list. However I still wasn't sure. A friend had just bought a PowerShot S60 and was getting good results with it. One problem he mentioned with S60 though was the the lens cover was all the on/off switch. So it was pretty easy to accidentally get shut on or off when you slipped it in and out of pockets or bags. As not graceful as I am that was enough to make me back away slowly from the S60.

I went to look at the A95 in person at a camera shop. I liked the way it felt in my hand. Not too heavy but not too light either. The cameras that were too light felt like I was going to break them. See above mention of my non-gracefulness for reasons not to have a too delicate camera body. So I was almost sold on the A95 but not quite. Finally I had the brilliant (at least for me) to search Flickr for more A95 shots. I was particularly interested in Macro shots and low light situations. Unforunately you can't just search flickr by camera used but you several people tag their pictures with their camera model and there are groups devoted to one camera or another. It took some time and patience but eventually I found enough A95 shots from diverse users to really get a feel for the camera's capabilities. At that point I was 95% sure that the A95 was my best choice and then I found the excellent Digital Camera-hq. At the time they had a feature on the best camera for different price points. The A95 was chosen the best for its price point. In addition there were several customer reviews that went along with Digital Camera-hq high recommendation. So I was sold and bought a Canon PowerShot A95 and I haven't regreted the choice for an instant.

This is a little late since Canon has introduced several new cameras in their PowerShot A-series but it's still a great camera that I highly recommend.

Some sample shots that I took: