Olympus C-40 Zoom Review

Overall Rating

Quality of images, small size AND good handling, amazing program and manual control as well as excellently setup automatic modes, neutral colour rendition particularly with flash, images need very little retouching, JPEG compression at best setting prints well without noticeable artifacts, uses Quicktime for movies.

Optical viewfinder not accurate, supplied battery not rechargeable, ludicrously expensive Olympus power supply (won't work with cheaper makes), ludicrously expensive Olympus memory cards (needed for panorama feature), full manual PDF-only.

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.