In addition to creating movies, the animation system can be used to render multiple scenes from a model in a single step - start the "animation", let it render all the scenes, and save each rendering in a separate file.
You can change layers and views for each image - but you cannot change rendering settings - like resolution, number of passes, etc.
I put together an article on how to do do this, where I used an animation to create 6 similar renderings of a model.
http://www.renderplus.com/wp2/wk/Using_Animation_to_create_individual_renderings.htm
This simple example shows the effects of lighting and reflection on various wood materials.
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