Digital Trends

Canon PowerShot SD630 April 24th, 2006 | by David Elrich

Performance

The Canon SD630 is ready to go almost instantly (about two seconds), most of that time spent waiting for the lens to extend. Since it was the first bloom of spring, new flowers immediately drew me toward them, camera in hand. Initially shots were taken in Auto, then macro and other settings for the available light.

At 6MP the camera was very responsive with very little lag between shots. The SD630 has Canon's DIGIC II chip to speed things along. The SD630 has the options of grid lines to help you frame your subject and keep it level. This is one of my favorite displays and it would be nice if all cameras had it but what can you do? Although responsive, the SD630 is no D-SLR, taking a maximum of 2.1 frames per second in burst mode. Shutter speed is good, ranging from 15 to 1/1500^th of a second.

Using this digicam is like riding a bicycle—it's very intuitive and a breeze to operate. The onscreen menus are decent, nothing exceptional like the HP R927 or Kodak EasyShare editions. I did have one knock. As mentioned, there's no Scene Mode dial so in order to get to Fireworks or whatever you need to drill into the menu system. Instead of having all the options on one level, you have to hit the menu key to reach all of them after Portrait, Night Snapshot and Kids&Pets. Hit the menu key and you'll reach Foliage, Indoor, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, Underwater, Color Accent and Color Swap. It's not the end of the world but it can and should be done better. The rest of menu system is straightforward and easy to operate. In Manual you can adjust Exposure Compensation, white balance, color (such as Vivid or Sepia) and metering modes. You can't adjust the aperture or shutter speed; the camera does that for you as you switch modes.

The LCD screen—which is such a key feature—works well in almost all instances. I took shots with the sun directly hitting it and I could see the subjects fairly well (after adjusting the brightness). The screen automatically brightens in a dark room. This may be sacrilege but I really didn't miss a small viewfinder.

After shooting loads of tulips, forsythia, weeping cherries and the like I also took a number of shots indoors, using the full gamut of ISOs available (the max is 800). I was pleasantly surprised noise levels at 400 were relatively under control while it was quite noticeable at 800.

Images were turned into 8 ½ x 11 prints using Canon Photo Paper Pro paper and a Canon Pixma MP780 printer. Overall the results were quite good—the flowers were pretty as, well flowers on a spring day. Colors were very accurate—red tulips were as they should be, red. Macro images were impressive but I was less thrilled with the digital macro setting which had trouble grabbing focus (traditional macro did not have a problem). Photos taken indoors were also good although there was some delay between flash shots. As noted, noise was acceptable even at 400 but 800 was stretching it way too far.

Click for a larger image (warning: large file size)

In keeping with the overwhelming trend to widescreen TVs, the SD630 lets you take 16:9 format stills at 2816 x 1584 pixels so you give up some resolution to fill the width of the screen. The camera takes decent videos at 640 x 480 pixels at 30 fps. There's a 4x digital zoom in the video mode so there's no sound as you zoom but the quality is poor which is why I always recommend against using a digital zoom unless you absolutely have to—no matter if in still or movie mode.