The Canon A630 Digital Camera looks like it will live up to its tagline of “Full featured, High performance”.

It certainly contains a truckload of features, like the advanced Auto Focus, the Built-in Flash settings, as well as Exposure Control, which can be used to vary the light on subjects. It even features a Histogram function that allows you to check the brightness of a potential shot. For the shots with an odd light source, the A630 offers a White Balance feature to adjust the contrast and brightness. It also has 21 shooting modes, and includes a 16MB MultiMediaCard for recording movies. This camera is designed so that you can take the perfect shot.

The one feature I don’t know if I’d use is the Optical Viewfinder. This little device looks like the little window on your old Kodak Instamatic. The only difference is that it works like a low-power LCD, and would take up less power than the main LCD screen. I think I would have to be in a real low-battery bind to ever use that. Especially since the Viewfinder, the words of Canon, “may be off-center”.

The camera is definitely high performance. The 2.5 inch LCD is packed with 11.5 Megapixels, and has an optional swivel feature in case you want to take a pic of yourself.

The Lens is a 4x optical that can apparently shoot objects with a magnification of sixteen times. I think it’s odd that the shooting distance specs specify a normal setting from 45cm to infinity. I assume that its say that anything from any distance will be shot clearly.

The Imaging Processor is powered by Canon’s advanced DIGIC II, which gives “high-definition and higher-speed processing”. The shutter speed is 15-1/2500 sec, and has fully adjustable ISO speed.

The Canon A630 should be on the market soon, and comes with 4 AA-size Alkaline batteries, an AV and Interference cables, a MultiMediaCard, wrist strap, and CD-Rom software.

Product website: http://www.canon.co.jp/Imaging/psa630/index-e.html