I have a cannon powershot a720is and will not take pictures in low light conditions, when i press the button to take picture the orange light comes on, but it does not take picture. When in a bright light condition it will take picture good. is this a autofocus issue or a flash issue

Did you accidentally press the DISP or DISPLAY button on the back of your camera? This manually turns the screen on and off to save batteries. You would then use the optical viewfinder to take pictures. To turn the screen back on, just press this button one more time.

This light flashes to show the camera is out of focus or you need to turn on Automatic flash in low lighting conditions.

The reason you must press the button half way is to engage auto focus. If you take pics by pressing once without doing this the picure is likely to be poor quality.

Keep practising the two push method with the button as it takes a while to get used to it. There is no way of changing this method other than ignoring it with subsequent poor results.

I was having the same problem and changing to Alkaline batteries seems to have solved the problem. I hope this helps!

Guys,
you need additional flash or brighter light to click in low lighting condition. In order to compensate for low light conditions, the shutter goes slow and therefore you get fuzzy pictures.

Another way is to click on movie(video) mode and then atleast you can see them moving around as well as while editing, you could take out some pictures from the video( though on lmuch ower resolution).

This is somthing your going to have to get fixed at a shop

this is a symbol for a low light condition. Either increase the light by opening curtains using in-direct light or just use a flash.

An ideea would be pressing the button a little bit harder and a little bit longer.Most of the cameras have that orange light before the flash(that appears when you press harder on the button) to reduce the red-eye effect in the pictures.
If this doesn't work, look carefully in the manual or the settings of your camera and try to find an option that turns on the flash.Also the type of the picture(indoor, sunny, night etc) can automatically disable the flash.
As a last resort, here is the camera's manual

Sounds like an oversensitive autorotate sensor. Recommend holding the camera very steady when taking a picture. If it still acts up, recommend just turning the sensor off, as you can use just about any photo editing software to rotate your photos if desired.

Press the Menu button, find and select the "Setup" menu, go down the list to find the "Autorotate" selection to turn it on/off.

If you check page 45 in the manual, you'll see that the orange light during the half press indicates that the flash is turned on. A single beep means that the camera is having difficulty getting a "focus lock" (usually when shooting in low light conditions). See page 100 of the manual for suggestions on how to improve the chances for getting a well-focused picture.

Press the button harder.