Let me show you a couple of things about the SD770 IS so you can quickly get started.

Here is your zoom lever. Just pull it to the right in order to zoom into your subject and push it to the left in order to zoom out. Here is your Tripod Mount. Here is the Battery and Memory card door. Just place a fingernail on this ridge right here and just push it out and the door will open. Just take the battery out, just move this little brown, switch over, and the battery should spring open. The battery is placed in the camera in this direction with the arrow pointing in towards the battery compartment. Use the battery to gently push the brown locking mechanism over and then slide it in.

Here is your Memory card. Just go ahead and push it in. It’ll click and spring out. This two, the sticker on the Memory card should be facing the back of the camera, press it all the way until you hear a click and close the door so it’s flash with the camera and click it shot.

Here is your Mode switch. On the right, you have the Record mode. In the middle, the Movie mode and on the left is the Playback mode to review images you’ve already taken on the Memory card.

Let’s go ahead and turn the camera on. In the back, you have two menus. One is the Main menu, the other is the Function menu. Go ahead and click the Function button to access the function menu. This Menu lists several functions that are most frequently accessed. Let’s go ahead and set this up.

First of all, you’ll notice at the top that my mode is currently set to Auto. And I don’t want that because it doesn’t give me control over many features that are going to help me improve image quality. So, let’s move that over to Manual.

Now, here around the Function button, not only are these buttons Flash, ISO, Macro and so on but this also access your navigation. Just press the Down, the Up, the Right or the Left in order to move these highlighted squares. Let’s go ahead and press the right button to move this over to Manual. And you can see that these other functions are now available to me. And White Balance is one of the options that I use very frequently and I’ll show why in a second.

Let’s go ahead and keep going down to the image quality. Image quality by default is set to Fine and this is not the best quality the camera can produce so I’m going to want to change that to Super Fine, just press the left navigation button and so it goes to Super Fine. And you’ll notice that the number of pictures I’m allowed to take on this Memory card has decreased but the image quality is going to be better so for my purposes that’s exactly what I want.

Below that if you go down one more you have image resolution. This camera is 10 mega pixels which is a lot of resolution. It is very, very nice quality when you’re printing large posters but if you’re really just using it to see pictures on a computer screen and not so much printing, you can go ahead and decrease the resolution that will increase the number of pictures you can take on any given memory card and the image quality will still stay at Super Fine and should be just fine. Use the large resolution if you‘re planning on printing very big images or if you like to crop in closer to the subject.

Okay, let’s go ahead and press Function to escape. Let’s go ahead and set up our Main menu. Press the Menu button down here to access the Main menu. And this is the menu that I very rarely access just in the beginning in order to change a few default settings that the camera has.

Let’s go ahead and go down, again use the down navigation button. You’ll notice that the Auto focus frame is at the face detect and I actually don’t like that. I want to tell the camera where I want to focus so I press the right navigation button a couple of times to move that to center. Then I’ll keep going down, auto focus frame size, I prefer small so I press the right navigation button. You can leave yours on normal or small either way the image quality is not affected.

Digital Zoom by default is set to standard which is really not good because if you do access the Digital Zoom, it will decrease the image quality so I like to turn this off. Press the right navigation button to turn that off. Now, keep going down. Now, the Flash settings, this is something that I do want to change and I’ll press the right navigation button to access that.

Everything is set up just fine except for the Red-Eye Lamp at the bottom. Everytime the flash is used, an orange light will illuminate and I don’t want that to happen because it really doesn’t help reduce red-eye. I can do that later in the playback mode. So, I’ll just choose Red-Eye Lamp off, move that over to off and then hit Menu to return. You can see down here in the screen that says Menu return to the main Menu and I’m back.

Everything else is set up just fine. I’m only going to change this set, the transfer button, that’s this button right here, I want to have that be functional when I’m recording images and I’ll show you why. Let’s go ahead and press the right navigation button to access that and I’m going to ahead and choose White Balance. I choose White Balance because it is one of the most frequently accessed functions that I’m going to need.

So, I have ISO quickly accessible through the Up navigation button at anytime and now I'm going to have White Balance accessible via the print transfer button. So, go ahead and hit Set to OK that, set right in the middle. And that’s it for the record tab.

Let’s go over to the Set-Up tab. The Set-Up Tab, I can move over by either going down in order to highlight the Record Tab, or going all the way back up to highlight the Record Tab, or I can use the Zoom Lever, just move that over to the right, and the Set-Up Tab is illuminated.

Now, I want to go down and just make you aware of the Date and Time. The Date and Time is something that really should be set in the camera. When you first turn it on, it will prompt you to set the Date and Time and this is very important for applications that organize your images. So, go ahead and hit Set if that’s not been set. Use the Up and Down navigation buttons to change any particular field and the Right or Left navigation buttons to move between the fields. So, that’s how you set the Date and Time. And then hit Set in order to accept your changes so you can get out of there.

Keep going down. If you get to a setting and you’re not sure, you don’t remember it being that way but something was change and you don’t remember where it’s located, you can always reset the entire Menu back to its factory default by choosing Reset All at the very bottom.

Go ahead now and press the Menu button to escape the Main menu. The Main menu is now set up. You can see now after I chose Auto Focus Frame Center, I have a little focusing square and it’s always going to be in the center. That is great because I want to tell the camera where I want to focus and not the other way around.

Go ahead and press the Display Button now. That will highlight the different functions and features that the camera is currently set to. So for example, I can see that my flash is set to Automatic. My ISO is set to automatic. I can see how many pictures I have left. I can also see my resolution in different settings. This is very valuable information before taking a picture. I want to see what my camera is set to.

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