I find this Olympus C-50 Zoom digital camera very impressive for such a small unit. Everyday subjects are tackled with ease but low light and fast moving subjects prove more than challenging. The results are more than satisfactory and enlarge easily to 10x8 and beyond.Colour balance is good in all aspects especially skin tones.A slow start up and no sound to mpeg movies are two major flaws to this camera but I would still reccomend it to a newcomer or eager amatuer.

I've had several cameras, both normal and digital, but none of them (even if more expensive) have had as good picture quality as this baby. The 5 Mpix of course helps but the real bonus is in the colours - they are really, really good - and when given time to focus the crispness of the pictures is of very high standard.


To mention the camera's downsides:

You have to close the lense cover to review images, the autofocus takes slightly too long to make the camera a real point-and-shoot (though I've yet to see a digital do that) and the video mode simply sucks :).



But with that said (and if you're not looking for a digital video recorder) the bonuses of this camera are awesome. The pictures are very, very good, using the presets ("Auto" for day and night setting for night) makes it a very simple camera to operate (my girlfriend hates gadgets but loves this camera!) and the battery (though special Olympus) lasts quite long - I'm filling my 96MB cards (around 100 pics) on a single 2 hour charge. Be aware that you need more ram than the default 32MB though - each picture is about 1MB if good quality, 0.5MB if ok quality.

Comparing the C50 to my existing C40, I am not impressed. The 3x zoom is just that little bit better than the 2.8x on the C40, and the shape is better. However, you lose the top LCD of the C40 that lets you know so many things. The colour screen has to come on every time you want to check the resolution, number of remaining images, flash status, battery life, plus the C50 has no built in noise reduction for those night shots. The C40 has a microphone and speaker to capture sound on quicktime movies. The quality isn't great of course, but the sound option is a nice bonus that the C50 doesn't have. However, the worst thing about the C50 in my opinion is the autofocus. I couldn't get a focus lock under 'low' light at all (this was indoors at night, with the lights on!) The controls on the C50 were stiff compared to the C40 and finally the rechargeable battery is proprietary, so if it runs out of power you can't just pop in a couple of alkalines. If you want a massive pixel output, I'd buy the C40 and use the interpolation feature to give 7+ mp output. Fuji users don't seem to mind their cameras giving an output twice that of the CCD, so why should you?