A rather over-complicated camera, by virtue of all manual controls requiring time-consuming wading through menus, with many menu items only depicted with cryptic icons. Unless you have time to do all that, you're left with using it in fully automatic mode, with all the problems that can entail (scenes with contrasty lighting conditions probably being exposed wrong, auto-focus focussing on the wrong object in scenes with depth to them, etc.).
But otherwise, given reasonable lighting conditions, and not trying to photograph something behind something else (e.g. through a window, fence, or past some other object), it takes quite good pictures. You can even get away with making up to A4-sized enlargements from it, though it shoots using a 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than the traditional 3:2 ratio for 35 mm photography, making it a nuisance for having normal-sized prints made.
Like every digital camera that I've tried, there's a lengthy delay between pressing the trigger and when the picture is actually taken. The auto-focus takes a few seconds, but you can pre-focus and wait before taking a picture, though you have to keep your finger on the button to not do another auto-focus when you want to take the picture, and you must ensure that the distance between the camera and object doesn't change in the meantime. Even then, it doesn't take a picture instantly, so these sorts of cameras are next-to-useless for candid or spur-of-the-moment photos.
![[picture of camera]](./images/canon-powershot-a520.jpeg)