I have been using a PowerShot A520 for half a year and I love it. It offers full control over the machine's possibilities. If you want to feel the real pleasure of photography, not just point-and-shoot, it's for you.
It has it's own limits just like all the machines from the compact class. It's very hard to take good images in dusk and night shots can be blurred. It takes a long time to save the images to flash, so it's very hard to make many shots about a moving target (possibility is P mode, but that's not auto). Flash takes a really long time to process (~3-4 sec).
On the other side night shots are very colourful and the contrast is good.
The two-battery system is very comfortable, you don't have to carry a lot of heavy batteries with you. It's possible to take about 150-200 images without flash just using two batteries.
I think it's a very good machine and worths the price for advanced hobbists. If you like photography, you will love the full manual control as well.
artur02March 19th, 2006