Well Designed/Great Pics/Easy to Use

This is a great camera. I bought it to take with me for a 24 day trip to Italy where I took about 1000 pics. Wow. Small enough to slip into the front pocket of my jeans(for security and easy access), yet this thing takes the most fantastic pictures. The battery charger is about 1/2 the size of a deck of cards - unbelievably small which makes it great for traveling. I did not buy the better Canon model as it had a large charging dock.

I'm not a digital geek, but I was able to use this camera without reading the manual and got great pics. This camera is so advanced that I almost always took pictures withOUT flash - at night outside or in low light indoor situations - and they all came out looking like great.

The battery has a really long life. A year after buying the camera, I used it on a 10 day trip where I could not recharge the battery and was able to take 150 pictures, review them and still had lots of battery life left. Amazing!

The memory card is about the size of your thumbnail. But the digital display is one of the biggest out there and fun to review/show to others. Reviewing/deleting pics takes seconds and does not eat battery life like older digital cameras. Although I used a huge 1 gig memory card, I would dump my pics into my iPod from time to time to free up disc space, and backup my pics (I was paranoid about losing the camera or getting ripped off). The Canon is really easy to use with the iPod and I saw that it is featured at the Apple store. The Canon and iPod talk to each other without much if any effort to enable a very easy download. Once home at my PC, I simply docked the iPod and had my pic software (Picasa - fantastic free software from Google!) download the pics from the iPod - easier and faster than from the camera chip.

I also have a 5+ year old digital Nikon, and a Nikon 35mm SLR. The Nikon Digital would take forever to turn on, and then would not always take the picture right away. The time between pictures, especially when using flash, caused me to lose many priceless pictures. Also, reviewing pics on the Nikon ate battery life UP. Not sure if Nikon improved on this, but I am thrilled with the speed of the Canon and the long life of the battery. Also, the Nikon battery life was horrible so I'd always have to carry around expensive backup batteries, and the battery charger was huge. Of course the 35mm probably made the best printed pics, but the quality isn't worth the hassle now days.

The video feature is fun and easy to use. Simply select video and push the picture button to start taking video with sound. I had fun trying it out at the office to see how it worked. But it eats through memory reallllly fast, so you'll need a large memory card. This is more of a novelty than a video camera - you can use this Canon to catch the birthday kid with his cake, but not the whole party.

Get a Canon SD630 and have some fun! Its easy.

PS: I found the SD630 at Costco for $300 after my trip. You can also get high speed memory cards at Costco at a good price.