Canon PowerShot A630 8MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom
by Canon
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Canon PowerShot A630 8MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom
Customer Review: Another wonderful Canon camera
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my third camera in the A-series. Like its preceders, it takes crisp and clear pictures full of vibrant colors. I absolutely love the Color Accent feature, to turn all but one color black & white, which creates a professional effect of accenting one color. The zoom is also fantastic - I used the 16x to photograph some trees in the distance, and it showed a squirrel on one of the branches that couldn't be seen with the naked eye, without losing any quality. This was astounding - the Canon SD630 took blurry pictures with a 6x zoom (one of the reasons I returned it), so I was very impressed by this.
One cool feature that Powershot preceders didn't have is the large swivel screen. It's very helpful if you want to put the 10-second or 2-minute timer on and capture a picture of you and friends. You can position the swivel screen so that you can see how you look (ex: too close, too far away, off-center) and get better photos. I also liked the large size; it's high-resolution, too, so it doesn't appear grainy on the screen. My friend Nathan has a 3" screen as well, but his has low-resolution and everything always looks grainy/blurry.
One final neat feature of the A630 is it being motion-sensitive. When viewing pictures, you can turn the camera 90º and view vertical images vertically on the screen. If you try to view vertical images horizontally, you don't get a very good idea of how it turned out.
All in all, this camera takes GREAT pictures and has neat effects, but is simple enough for an amateur to use.
Customer Review: great camera
Summary: 5 Stars
First let me say I am not a big digital camera expert. I know enough to take some great photos, but some of the technical terms go beyond my range of knowledge. The camera I owned prior to purchasing the A630 was a Cannon Power Shot SD 500 (digital elph). I loved the functions on it, but it was very light and after I broke the screen for the 2nd time... well, I decided it was time for a change.
The powershot A630 uses the AA batteries which #1 let me use rechargable batteries that I keep on hand yet in a pinch I can always buy new batteries, and #2 gives the camera extra weight. I appreciate the heft of this camera. I find I have fewer blurry pictures due to hand-shake. the Elph was so light that I tended to move the camera as I took the picture.
but here's the part that just flat out sold me on the A630. the swivel screen. as a family, we often take group shots of ourselves - using the timer feature. As we set ourselves up for the photo, we can swing the screen around so we can frame ourselves as the camera is counting down. (I also purchased a tiny flexible tripod which helps with the framing too). When we're not taking pix, I just turn the screen around to help protect it! knock on wood, I haven't broken it yet!
At the highest quality setting, I can only get a few pictures on the memory card, but with 8 mega pixels, even the lower settings give great quality photos.
I have not explored all options/functions/features on the camera, but overall, I love it.
Customer Review: Most of the usefulness of a DSLR in a pocket-sized package.
Summary: 5 Stars
Well, if you have big pockets. It's pretty clunky for a point-and-shoot, but the zoom and manual mode make up for it. It's small enough to lug around, yet the grip and features make it feel like a "real" camera. The all-manual exposure mode was my main reason for buying Canon A-series cameras, even though I've ended up using them in Program mode 99% of the time -- it's a very smart P. mode. Neither this one nor the previous A70 have disappointed me in any way (other than the A70's CMOS coming loose, but that's a warranty repair, I just chose to buy a new 8MP instead of getting the old one fixed).
The AiAF seems to alway pick the wrong part of the frame to focus on for me, but I turned it off and just used the center frame and a half-press of the shutter button. No problem with that method, since I grew up on Olympus OM-series SLRs.
The manual focusing leaves something to be desired, since it just gives a magnified center on the LCD, and no cheats -- you have to judge sharpness on the little LCD, by eyeballing it. But you'll never need to use the MF, since the auto works perfectly from one inch to infinity if you set it to only use the center zone, then focus on what you want to be sharp and hold the shutter button halfway down while you compose. The MF does show a distance scale at the top, so you can really fine-tune it if you're willing to break out a ruler.
Overall, I'd say it's as good as you can get without interchangeable lenses. Ease of use and features abound.
Customer Review: Just what I was looking for
Summary: 5 Stars
I think I looked at every camera on the Amazon site and figured out and compared each one to decide which one to buy. I finally decided that I needed a camera that used AA batteries and used a SD card. So then I started comparing the Canons and reading the reviews. I couldn't figure out why the A630 cost about the same as the A620, so decided to buy the one with the most pixels. As you can tell, I am not a camera expert; but, just an ordinary person wanting to take pictures that are above ordinary.
I had a cheap digital camera before that just wouldn't take pictures inside. I could put them in a photo software program and lighten them up a bit, but they just weren't good quality.
A lot of my pictures are taken indoors of kids,people and pets. No one ever shows those pictures when they post them as an example though. I was very concerned that if I got a new camera, it wouldn't be too much different.
Thank goodness the Canon A630 takes great indoor pictures even in my low- light living room. It is absolutely amazing. I have a 14x30 ft. living room dining room combination and when I take a picture at night on on end
of the room, the other end of the room shows up well lit up too.
There are lots of digital cameras out there that don't take good indoor pictures. This camera is not one of them. I'm so happy I decided on the Canon A630. I can hardly wait to take Christmas pictures with it! I know they will be great.
Customer Review: Unexpectedly Good Pictures
Summary: 5 Stars
My first impression of the A630 was less than stellar. After a year plus squinting through the viewfinder of my Rebel XT, I was really looking forward to composing my shots in a big, beautiful LCD again. Unfortunately, the LCD on the A630 may be big, but it's not beautiful. It does a fine job helping you review what's already been captured and presenting menu options legibly, but a mediocre job of rendering what's coming through the lens. The color is inaccurate and interference frequently appeared on the screen when half-clicking to freeze the focus. It still beats a viewfinder for composing an image but, frankly, I'd rather have the smaller LCD on my daughter's A620.
Ultimately, though, picture quality is everything to me, and here the A630 excels. I took 60+ pictures on a recent trip to Door County, WI and not one of them was a clunker, including several taken in very tricky lighting situations. Shooting modes worked as advertised although, with good lighting, the auto mode produced identical results. Indoors, flash pictures were perfectly exposed and the flash had a surprisingly good range.
On average, and I know this is heresy, the A630 took better pictures than my Rebel XT, and I didn't feel the need to Photoshop a single one of them. If I cared more about the LCD, I would have given this camera a lower rating, but a lower rating would not have done justice to the quality of the images this camera produces.