A80 focus assist doesn't help in low light condition

[leonid]

Focus assist feature seam to "work", and when enabled it emits some orange beam of light, while the camera struggles to focus. But it doesn't really help. I was expecting, that from the distance 3-9 feet it should focus regardless of the light conditions (may be even in the full dark). I can see that orange spot of light on the subject, but it doesn't seam strong enough for camera to focus.
The subject is human face. I try to move my central focusing point (I disabled 9-point focusing) to different parts: eye, nose or mouth, effect is the same.
Are there any workarounds? Is carrying around a flashlight the only option?

[stopbath]

If you can guess the distance to your subject (oh about two meters...) just enter that for the manual focus setting.

Also, the camera likes to use horizontal lines to grab focus on. If you can, help it out by trying to focus on horizontal lines.

The A series seems to have a AF assist lamp that just is not powerful enough for most folks (including me..)

[leonid]

This is a quote from Steve's DigiCams: "The A80 is also equipped with a focus-assist lamp which was quite effective in low ambient light, as was the LCD viewfinder".

In my camera I never noticed, that focus-assist made a slightest difference in camera's ability to focus. If lighting condition is good enough camera will focus anyways. If not, turning focus-assist on does not help.

Does my camera have a problem? I noticed that in this forum lot's of people were complaining about problem focusing in dim light. May be A80 comes in two flavours one with "quite effective focus-assist lamp" and other with useless blinking orange LED, which Canon proudly calls focus-assist lamp.