4. Hands On

It was a pleasure testing the A630. By owning two other Canon products, the menu system and layout of the controls felt immediately familiar. Initial startup time on the A630 was clocked at about 1.25 seconds - most of the time being used to extend the lens. Continuous shooting mode is rated about 1.8 FPS, but of course, if you have to use the flash, that rate drops significantly because of the strobe recycle time.

Macro mode was indeed nice to shoot. At wide angle, the minimum shooting distance is only 1 cm. Even at maximum telephoto, the minimum shooting distance is only 9.8". However, we found that the auto focus was difficult to use. With the limited depth of field in our test shots, we were much better off using center focus.

We were also pleased with the sharpness of the pictures taken at maximum optical zoom (4X). In our test shots, we zoomed into a construction site with radio towers approximately a mile away. The steel super structure under construction, as well as the towers, were acceptably sharp.

This shows the full frame of the picture shot at 4X Zoom (Optical) at ISO100.

This is a cropped view at 100% of the image above to show sharpness of the telephoto.

In the A630/A640, Canon replaced the ISO 50 rating found on the A620 with an ISO 80 setting. In addition, Canon added an ISO 800 and a new "HI" setting. The HI setting works just like the Auto, except that it will automatically select a higher ISO than the Auto mode. We were disappointed in the ISO800 mode, however.

In our tests, we found that the ISO 800 mode added so much noise to the picture that it was practically not usable (See images below). And using ISO 800 in a telephoto mode only worsened the apparent noise. We also discovered that while the ISO speed appeared on the information display on the histogram playback view for pictures shot in some, but not all modes, the ISO speed did not get properly recorded into the EXIF file information. We were unable to find the ISO speed that we shot using Photoshop CS2 or Corel Paint Shop Pro. Most other cameras we’ve reviewed properly insert the ISO speed into the EXIF data.