A great little camera.

The Canon PowerShot SD630 is basically the exact same camera as the PowerShot SD600, minus an optical viewfinder and plus a half-inch diagonally of LCD real-estate.

It is a 6 megapixel, compact digital camera about the size of a deck of playing cards (maybe even a little smaller). It has a sturdy plastic housing, and feels heavy for its size. The build quality is excellent, with a very few exceptions (see below), and I find the layout to be very user-friendly and ergonomic. The large 3" LCD screen is sharp and bright, and great for sharing your photos and videos with friends and family.

What's in the Box?

In the box you will find a LOT of paper work, including separate Basic and Advanced user manuals, warranty information, instructional sheets, and etc. The depth provided by the manuals is great! You can find good info on every single menu item and feature.

Digging down, you will find the camera itself, a Canon NB-4L Lithium Ion battery, a wall-charger for the battery, a grey nylon wrist strap, a 16 MB SD card, an A/V cable, and a USB cable.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do when opening the box is charge the battery. The provided Canon NB-4L Li-Ion battery and charger take about 90 minutes to give a full charge. The charger has an LED indicator that glows red during the charge cycle, and turns green when charging is complete.

The battery is inserted into the bottom of the camera, beneath a little plastic "door", in the same area that the SD card is inserted. The camera's #1 build quality issue presents itself at this time... the door itself is flimsy feeling, and the hinge inspires no confidence. It seems like it would be very easy to break. Built into this little plastic door is a rubber flap, which conceals a plug for an AC adapter that must be purchased separately.

Right next to this door is a threaded hole for using a tripod or mini-tripod, which is an absolute MUST-HAVE accessory for this little camera!

The first time you power up the camera you are prompted to set the date and time. After doing so, you are greeted with the "main screen" for whichever camera mode you are in. A selector switch on top of the camera allows you to select Review, Video, or Still mode.

Still Mode

In Still mode, you will find a myriad of options for taking photos in various conditions. You can select Automatic to let the camera choose what's appropriate, or Manual if you prefer to do so yourself. You can also select from a variety of pre-set modes: Indoors, Kids & Pets, Foliage, Fireworks, Night Time, Portrait, Digital Macro, Snow, Beach, Underwater, Color Accent, and Color Swap. Most of these are self explanatory, but a couple deserve a brief explanation.

In Kids & Pets mode, the camera sets the exposure, shutter speed and flash to the best settings for capturing fast-moving objects. This mode provides very good results in well-lit environments, and satisfactory results with the flash.

Color Accent allows you to take black and white photos with one user-selected color highlighted in the shot. For instance, if you took a picture of a bowl of candy, you could make everything B&W except the orange pieces, which would remain orange. It allows for artful highlighting of your subjects.

Color Swap allows you to "switch" an object's color. A red car can become blue in your photograph, for example.

In Manual mode, you can set the Exposure Compensation, White Balance (including a great custom white balance feature), Color Settings, Metering, and even ISO (80 to 800). This allows a great deal of control over your photos for a point and shoot.

The camera also has a "continuous shooting" mode, where you can hold the shutter release button down and snap pictures rapid-fire for as long as you'd like (until the SD card is full). Canon specs say that it can take them as quickly as 2 per second, which I've found to be accurate, but be aware that your settings will dictate the speed to a large degree. Shots with the flash will be slower than those without. Also, the speed of your SD card plays a role here. I use a SanDisk Extreme III card, and have been very happy with the speed of this camera. In the past, "shutter lag" was one of the major drawbacks of most digital cameras. Many times, you'd hit the button and the picture wouldn't get taken for 1-3 seconds afterward. The SD630 snaps them instantaneously!

Some other features I've found useful are the timer, which allows a user-programmable delay between pressing the button and exposing the photo, and focus-check and histogram found by hitting the "DISP" button during the short preview after you've snapped a shot.

Video Mode

The SD630 allows you to capture video and sound as well as photos. In Video Mode, you can choose between Standard, Fast Frame Rate, Compact, Color Accent and Color Swap modes for your videos.

You can also set a custom or pre-set White Balance, and choose between 30 frames per second and 15 frames per second, as well as 640x480 and 320x240 resolution.

You can shoot as much video and sound as your SD card will hold. I have found the videos that I've taken with the SD630 to be very high quality, especially compared with results from its competitors in the compact digi-cam world.

Review Mode

In Review mode you can view the photos and videos stored on your SD card. There are various options for slideshows and transitions between pictures available, but it's all pretty standard stuff here. You also use Review mode when you are transferring photos to your computer's hard drive, or viewing photos and videos on a TV with the help of the included A/V cable (a very cool feature!)

Conclusion

The Canon PowerShot SD630 is a great value. It is a very capable little camera, and so small that there's no excuse not to take it everywhere you go! I highly recommend this camera.