It's a camera. You don't snap AT it.

Cheap Camera anyone?
Are you a professional photographer? No? No kidding. Most people aren't, and the "point and shoot" generation of photographic cameras is a godsend to us. A piece of electronic machinery smart enough to figure out lighting conditions, shutter speeds and the like, all at the push of a button.

This camera is no different.

The Common Feature Set
The S630 boasts pretty common "point and shoot" functionality. Automatic flash and light sensor, self timer with single and double shot modes, automatic focus, built in 2" LCD screen; 32MB integrated flash RAM, "commentary" recording feature, SD Card expansion and video recording mode with audio.

Each feature works as well as they do in virtually every other digital camera priced at, above or even below what this one costs. The flash flashes when your indoors (and generally not when you're outside,) the autofocus is decent enough at deciding when you're too close or far away from something to shoot it properly (giving you a green "box" and a happy tone when what's on screen is at proper focus.)

At 6 megapixels, your camera can pretty easily grab an 8x10 image at 300DPI (or what could be considered a decently high resolution print photo.) The camera also supports 1 Megapixel, 3 megapixel, 4 megapixel letterbox, 5 megapixel letterbox and full 6 megapixel (square) images.
But any photo program will let you crop & resize your images. On the other hand, so will the camera - more on that later.

The camera has built in Flash memory which stores about 4 of the best quality images, and nearly 50 of the lowest quality. Since the camera supports SD card expansions, you're really going to want to buy a nice 256, 512 or even 2-4GB SD card expansion for your photo shooting pleasure, although 4GB of 6 megapixel images is enough to make a professional wedding photographer cry.

When most digital cameras, we all know the phenomena where you "click" the shutter, and the picture is taken "sometime later..." this is due to a variety of factors not the least of which is how slow the camera actually writes to its memory banks. The S630 is a really pleasant surprise in just how fast it snaps pictures and commits them to internal RAM or even a cheap SD card.

.9 seconds per shot, worst case scenario. That's amazingly fast for a cheap camera! That's the speed to the SD card too, not the internal memory, which is really fantastic when you want to snap pictures that aren't perfectly pre-staged. You know, like LIFE.

It's a pocket camera, but still features a speedy 3x optical zoom. The camera also has digital zoom, but it won't engage seamlessly during a zoom cycle, which is good, because digital zoom reduces image quality.

Shooting presets are very common with virtually any digital camera these days. The S630's preset collection isn't much different than your garden variety of presets. There's portrait, outdoor, night, and a few others that are Samsung's own terminology to describe "less than perfect photographing situations". For the point-and-shoot fan, the presets are a good way to guide the "automatic" process without getting on your hands and knees and twiddling with settings, while still getting a pretty good shot in the process.

The video feature of the camera is interesting. It shoots rather high quality video in 640x480 or 320x240. One of the reasons the camera is so good with video is that it's practically uncompressed. A 10 second video clip takes up a good 15 megabytes on your storage device, be it internal memory (in which you can kiss a decent video clip goodbye,) or an SD card (in which you'd better have bought that 4GB card...)

One big complaint about the videos are that they're AVI video files with Apple "Open" MJPEG compression. I don't really think Windows Media player will play videos from the camera without additional software. It might be free software, but you still have to get it to watch videos from the camera, unless you own a Mac. QuickTime doesn't seem to have much of a problem with these AVI files.

As far as the quality of pictures goes, the camera shoots pretty sharp images. The CCD is pretty high in quality, and the amount of "film grain" you get in less than optimal shooting scenarios is almost on par what you would get with a pricier film camera. At 6 megapixels, images are very sharp, and not just on the LCD preview screen either.

But mundane features found in virtually every other camera aren't unique, and most certainly NOT why I bought THIS camera over any others. Indeed - what makes this camera a cut above the others are the features found in it that are commonly only found in cameras HUNDREDS of dollars more.

The "unique" features
For $100, you're generally going to get a digital incarnation of an "instamatic" (and for those of you not old enough to know those were, think photo camera with NO preview, and only 20 or so shots.)
But why get any old $100 digital camera when you can get something that works pretty well and comes with some pretty neat, but useful features? Like this camera?
One of the most attractive attributes of this camera is a manual shooting mode that lets you control more than just the zoom and white balance... in Manual shooting mode, you can set light metering (center of the screen, or 'balanced' across the shot,) simulate virtual film speed for low light conditions, and the most impressive feature - you can change the shutter speed.

By shortening the shutter speed and simulating higher speed film, you can capture sharper, low light images without a flash. Although you DO have a flash, sometimes this can be advantageous.

In addition to shortening the shutter speed, you can lengthen it to 8 entire seconds. At this length, in virtually any room with light in it, you'll end up with a bleach white screen, but in "Controlled conditions," this can be very... Well, ask an art student.

My favorite feature has to be "continuous" shooting mode. If you've ever been to a real professional photo shoot, you've got insanely powerful lights and the constant "SNAP, SNAP, SNAP" noise of the camera. That's the camera taking one picture after another in rapid succession.

Digital cameras have really never lent themselves to this notion because of slow imaging sensors, slow media write time, and overall the slowness of the electron moving through metal. Lots of other cameras have a "fast shot" or "continuous" shot mode, which means while you hold down the trigger, the camera keeps clicking...

Sadly, most other cameras with this (the cheap ones anyway,) take a shot without the flash at "very high film speed" and then take forever to commit your new picture to the card. Not the S630. It clicks away whilst you hold down the trigger and doesn't stop until you let go (or the memory fills up.)

Continuous mode works best in well lit environments, since the flash doesn't come on with it.
If full manual is too much for your taste, there's the "Programmed" mode, allowing you to manually control the shooting mode, resolution, the flash and virtual film speed.

The camera controls the shutter speeds so you get to mingle with what you want, and leave alone what you don't.

Shooting schmooting. How 'bout viewing?
The best part of a digital camera was being able to go back in memory, delete your gawdawfulm, amateurish, fuzzy foot-shots from the "roll" before getting the images printed at your. Well, before your local Photo Shack had a digital photo printer, your own home PC printer...

Digital cameras have featured photo review for a long time, although cheap cameras like this one are newcomers to photo deletion and now - editing.
That's right; you can edit your photos on-the-go, without a PC, right from the camera.
Most of the editing the camera can do is pretty simple stuff that iPhoto for Mac, or Windows Photo Viewer (hint: Vista) would do in a second. You can downsize/shrink an image, crop it (by zooming and panning to select where to crop,) you can color adjust the image, including applying black & white, and sepia tone effects, as well as a cute "comic book" panel feature that lets you assemble several shots on the camera into a cute comic book page spread.

Not useful, but cute.

Regular photo viewing includes slideshow mode (with music for some reason,) multi-thumbnail mode, and good old fashioned "full screen preview".
All these features are really highlighted by just how great the LCD screen is on the thing. 2 and change inches of display space are NOT wasted. The display is crisp and bright.

Albeit small.

What I didn't like...
Actually, this is a pretty sweet camera. The camera gets less battery life than more expensive counterparts that do even more, which could be an issue if you like to shoot for 45 minutes with the flash continuously without a spare set of AA's handy. Otherwise, provided you use rechargeable batteries in this sucker, it'll give you a decent 45 minutes of virtually continous use (with an SD card) on a full charge. For those of you shooting a marathon for the major news wire services, I'd suggest bringing extra batteries.

Summary
Cheap cameras are great for cheapskates, but not when they suck. Rest assured, this camera is well worth your $100. It's fast to snap pictures. It's smart when it takes pictures, and if you want to override "automatic" shooting for your own "photographers touch", this camera won't hold you back like some other point-and-shoots which are so "smart", they're actually dumb.

It shoots great still images, and the videos are gigantic, but they're crisp and smooth, if you can fit them somewhere while you shoot them.
The battery life is quite decent, despite rumors to the contrary, actually. But only if you use rechargeable batteries (yes, they DO last longer than Alkaline.) don't be afraid to pack an extra pair for a special event. You'll need 'em.

Yes. Definitely worth $100. Probably even more. Thank goodness for cheap goods.