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Friday Slide Show: Revisiting the Canon A3100 IS
25 September 2026
Canon's A3100 IS, released in February 2010, was its first PowerShot to use a rechargeable lithium battery, although you couldn't charge it via USB but had to take it out and put it in a wall charger. If you can find one today, you'll pay between $100 and $180 (originally $180) for it.
It featured a 12-megapixel sensor matched to a 4x optical zoom with a 2.7-inch LCD monitor. Video captures were limited to just 640x480 pixels.
In our 2010 review, we bemoaned the A-series loss of manual control (PASM in general, in fact) and the departure from convenient and inexpensive AA batteries. It was smart enough to automatically engage Macro mode when you got close to your subject, though.
It also had a Low Light mode that reduced noise by binning pixels. The usual 4,000 x 3,000-pixel image thus became a 1,600x 1,200 image.
So we don't have fond memories of the camera itself. But in looking back at the images we took with it, we have to admit to finding a few we really liked.
Once again, we wondered if 16 years later, Lightroom Classic could breathe new life into them.
You might be wondering why we keep running old digicam images through Lightroom Classic's Camera Raw and don't try DxO PureRaw or PhotoLab 10, say. The reason is that old digicams saved JPEGs, not Raw files. Camera Raw in Lightroom doesn't mind working with a JPEG but DxO's PureRaw and PhotoLab are not so accomodating. So to get the most out of our old JPEGs, we rely on Camera Raw in Lightroom (and Photoshop for our example below with the same settings as in Lightroom).
This set of images varies from flowers to cars, from macros to landscapes. If you compare the original camera rendering (in the review) to what our edits look like, you'll get an idea of the degree of improvement possible.
This detail from one image is just one example:
This shot of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance was obscure as a camera JPEG. But tweaking a few sliders in Photoshop's Camera Raw brought it to life. You can actually see the bridge, a rather significant improvement.
We'll note that using the Auto button in Camera Raw didn't do anything at all. We really had to add Dehaze, open the Shadows and darken the Blacks to improve the image.
Once again, we see that if you put on old digicam back in harness, you will be rewarded if you spend some time editing the images.
