Labs

The S630 is the smaller sibling to Samsung's S850, a £100 camera with exceptional image quality and full photographic control that narrowly missed out on an award last month because of its flawed automatic exposure settings. Like the S850, the S630 offers manual exposure, which is a must for creative photographers or anyone who wants to experiment with their images. The automatic exposure bracketing feature takes three pictures of varying exposure, allowing you to choose the best later or even combine

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the three with software, but the two-second gap between shots is too slow for our liking. Aperture priority, shutter priority and manual focus are unavailable, so budding creative photographers on a budget are better off with the S850.

In normal use the S630 is slow, taking three seconds to recover between shots despite an impressively fast auto-focus. Continuous mode shoots at a passable 0.86 frames per second, but the screen is blank and there are no audible cues to reassure the user that anything is happening. Its battery life was the worst of the cameras here. It ran for just 282 shots in our test, despite using the same high-capacity NiMH AA batteries that produced 557 shots with Pentax's E30.

Image quality proved extremely variable in our tests, and ultimately the S630 came seventh in our quality league table. We struggled to find a pattern to identify which conditions produced the worst results, but ultimately its poor photos stood out more than its best shots. We'd pay more for the Panasonic Lumix or FujiFilm F20, both of which produce consistently better images.