Larger prints will not lose any of their quality with the PowerShot A630 and the 4x optical zoom allows you to either take close-up shots or more distant shots without any loss of precision. The 1cm Macro mode lets you come as close as 1cm to your subject without any loss of detail. The Canon PowerShot A630 has 9 point AiAF to keep off-centre subjects sharply focused.

The Canon A630 offers various modes including, auto, shutter and aperture priority AE, manual, portrait, landscape and night together with special scene modes where selections have been preset to suit the situation. These include snow and beach, fireworks, kids and pets, indoor, foliage and underwater. Manual mode allows plenty of scope for your own creativity. My Colors offers photo effect choices such as vivid, neutral, sepia, black and white, skin tones and custom.

Movies with audio can be shot in AVI (Motion JPEG compression + WAVE) with the Canon A630 at either 15 or 30fps with length depending upon memory available. A 32MB memory card is supplied with the Canon PowerShot A630 which can use SD (Secure Digital) card / SDHC / MMC card. The 4 x AA Alkaline batteries supplied with the PowerShot A630 give a battery life of approximately 280 shots or 500 shots if Canon NB-2AH batteries are used. The extended battery life is as a result of the DIGIC II image processor which deals with camera functions and processes images at high speed.

Images can be viewed on the 2.5" vari-angle LCD screen which, because of its flexibility, creates opportunities for the more unusual shots to be taken. It also has a 3:2 ratio overlay which indicates the printable area for standard photo prints. The optical viewfinder has real-image zoom.

The Canon PowerShot A630 has ISO equivalents of auto, high ISO auto, 80/100/200/400/800 - the high speed ISO 800 allowing correctly exposed images to be shot without a flash in low light conditions. Flash modes are auto, manual, on/off, red-eye reduction and slow sync. White Balance options include auto, daylight, cloudy, fluorescent x 2, underwater, tungsten and custom.

The PowerShot A630 is PictBridge compatible and movies can be connected to a TV or computer for full screen playback.