Olympus C-40 Zoom

I love my Olympus C-40 Zoom Camera! I have had it for about 3 years now and it is fabulous! I've taken over 3000 photos with it! It is so easy to use, fantastic quality and overall just brilliant! The only things I don't like are it is a little bit too bulky compared to some of the cameras around now and for £500 I think it was a little bit expensive.

i've had the camera for 6 months now and it has proved a real fun piece of kit. Its small enough to pop into a pocket, I've taken it to night clubs and had a real scream, never a missed shot, fantastic.

It almost replaces my EOS for sheer convenience.

I took a long time deciding to go digital and have been

surprised and delighted with the ease of use and image quality from the Olympus C40 digital camera.

It is usually possible to obtain photo-quality prints with minimum

retouching. Don't be fooled by the size of the camera. The lens quality is

good with little flare and the feature list is as long as your arm. Despite

the length of the feature list, the camera is still easy to use,

particularly if you have previously used an SLR. All the usual SLR modes are

there and plenty more besides. To begin with, I used it in fully automatic

mode, but quickly became proficient in its many other modes. Almost any

setting, including aperture, shutter speed, notional film speed, white

balance, sharpness &c can be overridden. Any particular setting can be

memorised in a favourite setting mode. This is a deep camera with many menus

to negotiate using the monitor. The menus are well thought out, well

displayed and well described in the manual. They are easy to come to grips

with, once the initial felling of being overwhelmed by their broad scope

subsides with familiarity. The supplied manual is more than just a

quick-start guide and should keep a beginner happy for a long time. The main

manual is excellent and about 200 pages long. It is in PDF format which, for

manuals, is my pet hate. You can't easily browse the manual and need to

switch on the 'puter if you need to view it - aaarrrggghhh! Compared to my

favourite SLR, it is much handier and is easy to carry around all the time.

Images are not as good as those obtained by scanning a slide or negative at

4000dpi and 16bit per channel, but are almost instantly usable and take a

awful lot less effort to obtain. Scanned slides in particular can take a lot

of time to obtain and correct. The main drawback with the camera is the

delay between pressing the shutter button and the the shutter operating. You

get used to the delay while still wishing that it was smaller. If you have

MacOS 8.6 or later and the latest USB drivers, just plug in the camera to

the USB port and copy the images to your hard disc. The supplied Camedia

Master software has limited photo editing compared to Photoshop or Canvas,

or even the lesser consumer Photoshop editions, but would probably suffice

if you had nothing else. At first it appears to be a PC port - clunky, very

slow. However, you can really speed it up by allocating more memory to it (I

need treble the default amount), so that it carries out all edits in memory.

It then becomes a speedy viewer and includes an "Instant fix" item in the

"Image" menu that is surprisingly effective. If you want to catalogue your

images try iView, but for first viewing stick with Camedia Master. One of

the two CDs contains PC-only software and the Camedia Master software

appears to have more features in its PC guise. You can save files to the

card as well as reading them, but beware. The camera uses a well thought out

system of naming files (archaic DOS 8.3 system unfortunately) and gets very

confused if you try to name the files with more immediately understandable

names. You could still use a card and the camera for transferring large

non-C40 files between computers via USB as long as you only used the camera

to monitor transmission. If you are thinking of getting a card reader to

improve speed of transmission of images to your computer, don't bother. The

C40 is as fast as my reader. However, having a USB powered card reader

always attached to one of the the USB ports of the 'puter is handier than

having the camera's batteries run out during or soon after transmitting

images. The supplied 16Meg Smartmedia card is inadequate - storing one TIFF

or four high quality JPEGs. 128Meg cards are now reasonably priced and store

11 TIFFs, about 45 High quality JPEGs and over 1300 low quality JPEGs! The

supplied battery is not rechargeable. I bought the camera as a bundle with a

case, rechargeable batteries and a charger. I would recommend the 1600mAh

batteries that were bundled. As with all digital cameras, the C40 is a

battery hog. I keep the supplied battery as a backup and use the

rechargeables all the time if I can. In cold weather (0 to -5C), the

rechargeables struggle to produce enough current to power the monitor and

zoom at the same time, but I presume this is more a feature of such

batteries than the camera. Above 7C, you can use all the camera features.

Under more temperate conditions, you should be able to fill up a 128Meg card

on two sets of two rechargeable batteries as long as you use the viewfinder

for taking images and don't use the flash all the time. This leads to the

second main drawback of the camera.It records an image larger than the view in the viewer and offset upwards a fraction even when not close enough for parallax problems. You don?t miss anything in the viewfinder, you just waste resolution cropping images afterwards. Again, you begin to get used to this in time and compensate. Using the monitor, as with all digital cameras, will drain the batteries much more quickly.

The camera can take and play back Quicktime movies (using only digital zoom with sound on) - handy for Mac users. They are fairly low quality at 15 frames per second at 320x240. Having said that, I used the camera to record a movie of the moment Newport County came onto the pitch versus Blackpool (English football - FA cup first round replay). It captured the mayhem and excitement well, giving excellent exposure in the cover of the stands and on the floodlit pitch. Sound and image quality are basic as is to be expected from a still camera, yet I am happy that the camera allowed me to make a memento of the occasion.

The power supply for the camera is expensive, but is very probably needed if you want to use the camera intensively, say for showing a 'slide show' or Quicktime movie on the TV via the supplied video lead. You will also need a cheap SCART to video-and-audio adaptor to do so. The power supply would be handy if you intend to use the camera to transmit images to the 'puter rather than a card reader.

This review only scratches the surface of what is possible with this camera. The software is poor, but most people have a more suitable alternative anyway.

All in all, I am delighted with the tiny but handy size, the handling, the amazing image quality and the depth of features which more than make up for any drawbacks.

Based on a couple of hours playing since I only got the camera today......

This is my first personal digital camera after many years with "real" film though I have used a Nikon coolpix 950 at work. First impressions are of a very small camera with lots of options. Anyone used to a 35mm camera with a variety of exposure options (aperture, shutter, manual, bracketing, compensation) should have no problems using this digital camera.

Menus are fairly quick to get around, once you know where to find the options you want.

Software.... I've got W98SE as an upgrade from W95 and the only way to get pictures is to use the USB autoconnect feature where the camera is seen as a removable drive in explorer. If you've got W98 you need to tell the install program where to find the .inf file. W98SE detects the camera no problem.

The Camedia Master 2.5 software isn't USB compatible with W95, W98 (upgrade from W95), NT4.0 or 2000 standard so files can't be downloaded directly into the software.

Haven't got through the supplied battery yet, so no comment on battery life (with supplied non-rechargable).

Overall, very happy with the camera, a little less so with the software.