Canon PowerShot A410

A small brick to use as a sketch pad on-line or for a small finished printed photo

It produces nice shots with good tonal range and nice colours. The black and white option is also good, although I don't use it because it limits the options in Photoshop. But be aware of the camera's limitations.

The camera is like a small brick. That means it is a bit bulky in the pocket but it does mean that because the bottom of the camera is flat the camera can be used by putting it down on a convenient surface (a wall, a table top etc), and using that surface as a makeshift tripod. Just learn to know where the camera is pointing (don't bother looking at the LCD or in the viewfinder) and press the shutter. That overcomes one of the limitations, which is that the shutter/aperture combination are decided by the camera, so camera-shake is bound to result in low light without a tripod. It does have a triod bush so a decent mini tripod (Manfrotto make one) is an option.

The in-camera sharpening is quite agressive and as it only produces jpegs, that is a limitation. I open in Photoshop, make the changes and save as a PSD. At 100% the jeg artefacts are very evident and in fact they can be see above about 40%. So the camera is limited.

It would be a much better camera if it could save in an uncompressed format or had options for saving jpegs with less aggressive compression.

In terms of size the nearest cameras I have used have been film cameras (Ricoh GR1 and Pentax Espio Mini).