Olympus Camedia Digital
 C-2000 Z Camera

In years past, I have had the opportunity to take a close look at a number of digital cameras and have always been impressed by the direction and advances in the technology. Last year, was the year of the megapixel camera giving you images up to 1280x960 pixels. This year, most of the new cameras are in the 2 million-pixel range and the new Olympus C-2000 Zoom is right in that range at 2.1 megapixel. This camera upon first looks reminds me of the Rangefinder types of cameras that we used for years but oh what a difference. Easy to hold and carry, small enough for a pocket or purse, and yet heavy enough so that when you take pictures, you know you have a real camera in hand. I was able to use the camera under a very wide range of environments and locations and found that it was acceptable to use in nearly everyone one of them. Probably the only difficulty would be taking pictures against the light. The sun can be difficult if it is shining onto the viewfinder or the LED screen and currently there is no lens shade available. I had the chance to take pictures indoors and out and at all sorts of lighting situations from early morning sun rise to sunset and darkness and found the camera to work wonderfully well.

I like using this camera as it uses the widely available SmartMedia memory cards. The camera comes with a 8MB card and I had use of another 32MB card that would hold nearly 70 pictures in the HQ 1600x1200 mode.  The other must have that comes with the package I had was the 4 AA Olympus Rechargeable batteries and the charging unit. As an aside, I think that these batteries are the best available and I use a set for nearly every device I own that uses AA batteries. They are good and save you a bundle in batteries. If you don’t have them, go and buy an extra set. It became quite evident on our picture taking trip that one person used the LCD panel exclusively to take his pictures while I used the view finder and found that can go through several sets of batteries in a single day of picture taking.

The box is a complete set of what you need for digital photography. The Introductory box that I got including the Zoom camera, the 8MB media card that will hold 15 pictures at the HQ mode, cables for either Windows or Mac computers and a video cable for TV output. The batteries and charger I just mentioned, camera strap, user guide, and one of the neatest remote control units I have seen in a long time. One thing missing from the box would be an AC Adapter for the camera. If you must use the included cables to transfer pictures, you will go through batteries quickly and I would strongly recommend either the AC Adapter or the Olympus FlashPath adapter that allows you to take a SmartMedia card, put it in the adapter, and then put it in you’re A: drive on your computer. That is usually the best way to transfer images to a desktop computer. For transferring images to a notebook, get a SmartMedia PCMCIA adapter card.

Upon first looks of the camera, everything is labeled very well and is legible with the exception of the battery placement in the camera.  While most of the labels are color printed on black matte, the battery position indicators are black etched onto the black camera, difficult to see in normal lighting and impossible under adverse.  One other complaint is that the lens cover is not very secure on the lens and can easily pop off without your knowing it, strongly recommend on of the stick on string attachments for it you see at the photo stores.

This camera passes the ease of use test in that you can simply pick it up and start taking pictures. The power button is easy to see on top and marked and the shutter release is placed just in front of it. One immediate advantage over the point and shoot cameras is that you never have to worry about having your fingers in front of the lens as it pops out when you turn the camera on. A couple of quibbles would be that if you hit the power button with the lens cap on, the camera makes all sorts of grinding noises as it cannot push out the front lens. The second is that when taking pictures, you sometimes can easily hit the power button rather than the shutter release.

Another issue with this and many other cameras is that they all assume that you use your right eye to take pictures looking through the viewfinder. The problem for us left handers (left eye people) is that if you use your left eye, you tend to put a nose print on the LCD screen. Fortunately for the new Olympus cameras, they do a very good job in covering it with glass to make it easier to clean with a swipe of cloth or in a pinch, your hand or shirt sleeve.

Other features to immediately like about the camera include the 3X optical zoom. It is connected directly with the camera’s viewer so that as you zoom in and out, you immediately can see what you will take the picture with either through the viewfinder or the back LCD panel. That back panel is greatly improved over the previous screens I have seen on cameras. It is almost 2 inches in size and is a very bright TFT (Thin Film Transistor) display, the same kind of technology you see on some of these great laptop screens. It is quite viewable in most lighting situations. Another feature to like is the ease of swapping cards. When taking pictures, I always recommend that you have a couple of extra memory cards and with this camera, swapping them is very quick and easy.

To specifications: the lens is a very high quality spherical glass lens equivalent to a 35 to 105mm zoom on a traditional 35mm camera. While the range of F stops is limited to F2 through F11, the shutter speeds go from ½ to 1/800 in automatic mode. One thing that sets this camera apart is that it has three picture taking modes, fully automatic, shutter priority, and aperture priority. While you can use the viewfinder for the fully automatic mode, you need to take the pictures using the rear LCD screen in the other two modes to see what settings are being used in automatic mode. When taking the pictures in low lighting situations and you are not using the flash, it is better to have the rear LCD panel turned on so that you can make sure of the settings. With automatic cameras, it is very easy to take a picture with a shutter speed that is too slow. For years, the pros have told me that if you are holding a camera, you should never take a picture with a shutter speed slower than 1/60^th of a second. At that point, use a tripod or in this case, set the camera on top of something steady and use the self-timer or the remote control unit. Three other features of the camera help you to fine tune your pictures and one is exposure adjustment. You can adjust the exposure compensation from a –2 to a +2 range. The second method of fine-tuning is by changing the “film” ISO sensitivity. An ISO range of 100 to 400 can be selected for each picture if needed. Finally, the third method is what they call White Balancing. It allows your camera to be set based on the lighting available. From automatic, you can choose Daylight, Overcast, Tungsten light, or Fluorescent light modes.

Unlike typical Rangefinder, you have a choice of four different focusing modes as well; autofocus, macro mode which goes from 8 to 31 inches; and two fixed focus modes, 8 feet and infinity.  Picture taking is also enhanced by the number of flash modes available as well. Four basic flash modes are available; auto flash which has a working range of up to 18 feet, red eye reduction mode which gives you a short burst of light before actually taking the picture, flash turned off, and flash turned on for those times you need some fill light. All of these modes have worked very well. The camera also has a connection for an external flash unit and you can set the main flash to go off at different intervals for low light photography.  Flash recycle time between flashes is good at around 6 seconds.

The megapixel rage today is to get as many into a camera as you can at a reasonable price and Olympus has certainly done so with the Camedia C2000-Z.  With 2.1 million pixels generated by the solid state CCD (Charged Coupled Device) imaging unit. What it means is that you are can store 1600x1200 pixels per picture. Where the difference between High Quality (HQ) modem and Super HQ, is the way the picture is stored on the SmartMedia card. All SQ (Standard Quality) and HQ pictures are stored as JPEG images. In SHQ, you have your choice of JPG or TIFF image formats with the TIFF using no compression. In fact, taking a picture at SHQ using a 8MB SmartMedia card, you can store 7 pictures with JPG but only 1 TIFF image. What you need to consider when taking pictures is what you want to do with the picture. If only to output to screen, then the lower quality modes will be just fine. But to enlarge and print an 8x10 or 11x14 print, you better go with the TIFF images. The example Olympus gives us is that for an 8MB card, you can store 122 SQ pictures, 15 HQ pictures, 7 SHQ in JPG mode, and 1 SHQ in TIFF mode. Fortunately, as with many of the digital cameras today, you can easily view each picture as taken or after the fact and selectively delete those that don’t turn out well and then take it again. One downside to this camera as well as nearly every other one I have looked at is that it can take quite a while at times to write the picture out to the memory card before you can take another picture. In this camera, the wait time could be from 2 to 43 seconds. In taking my pictures in HQ mode, it seemed to take an average of 18 seconds.

In using the camera, for most situations, it is a matter of turning it on and taking the picture. When the situation is different, the top LED display is very useful. It first tells you, after giving you an indication of the battery status, how many pictures you have left to take and in what quality mode you are in. If you have changed any of the default setting as to flash, aperture, shutter, or focusing, it will indicate that in the LED as well. You can immediately know what mode the camera is in. In taking the picture, the viewfinder also tells you when it is going to use the flash and whether you have proper exposure and focusing for the picture. For those of us that don’t like to wear glasses when taking a picture, there is a diopter adjustment wheel on the viewfinder to bring the image into focus.

Now after all of this, you still have choices in your picture. I mentioned the optical zoom mode which is a 3X zoom taking you from an equivalent 35mm to 105mm mode. There is also a digital zoom available in SQ mode only that zooms it in a further 1.6X, 2X, or 2.5X.  Not having a race track handy when testing the camera, I did not try out the sequence mode but with it you can capture up to 45 images at 2 frames a second in SQ mode and 5 images at a frame a second in HQ mode. One thing to watch out for is you better use a tripod, as the fastest shutter speed will be 1/30^th of a second. I also did not use the Panorama mode. I have found a couple of packages that do an excellent job of image stitching and so use that for generating panorama pictures.

Other features available include formatting and erasing options on the memory cards and several picture display options to view your pictures on the camera. With only having a 1.8 inch screen on the back, I really wasn’t too interested in seeing the option of displaying nine pictures at a time but you can zoom in on a saved picture to see more clearly.

External connectors on the camera include the ports for the AC Adapter, connector to an IBM or Macintosh compatible computer, the video out for attaching the camera to a television, external flash connector, and finally, the bottom tripod mount.

While the camera itself is great to use, the manual is a typical Olympus manual and needs some getting used to.  Each page of the manual is split into four segments. To go with a graphic to show you what is going on, there are translations into English, French, and Spanish so it stretches to 245 pages to get all the information they have. To force you to read all the cautionary pages, they don’t start the table of contents page until page 34 and there is no index.  Once past that, the manual is logically oriented. It takes you from the basics of getting started with the camera, to the finer points of taking pictures, to the options.

As with any digital camera, the software for camera connection, downloading pictures, and image editing should be a minor consideration when selecting the camera. You will spend far more time with the camera than you will the software. You will also find over time that with nearly every scanner, camera, and digital input device, you will begin to accumulate a number of image editing packages and in fact, If they are good ones, you will be able to acquire the images from the camera/scanner/etc through them. Over time, I have found that I really prefer to use something like Jasc, Inc. Paint Shop Pro for image editing and getting my images ready for both the web sites and for printing. As I mentioned, your camera comes with the cables for connecting it to the computer and I strongly recommend that you come up with an alternative way of doing that to both save time and battery life.

The Olympus Camedia C2000Z comes with both Olympus’ own connection software as well as one of the best tools I have seen for merging images into a single panorama, Enroute’s Quick Stitch. You should see the review of Enroute’s Quick Stitch Software I wrote last time but it is a great package for taking overlapping pictures of a scene and merging them all together. Also included in the package is Adobe’s Photo Deluxe version 2. Again, if you use a product like the Photo Deluxe, you can import pictures directly from the camera, scanner, or what other electronic device you attach to your computer.

In using my laptop to connect to the camera, the installation went flawlessly. The software loaded with a minimum of fuss, and once I connected the cable and fired up the software, it quickly found the camera and made contact to download my pictures.  Again, depending on how many pictures you have to download, it can take quite a bit of time.

The last test of a digital camera is the actual output. For screen and web based images, you need far less resolution than the camera delivers but for printed output, I can immediately see what a 2.1 megapixel image can do. I printed four different images that I took on the trip out west on an Epson Stylus Color 800 printer. The printer handles 1440 dpi and has excellent color capability and I was very much pleased with the output of the photographs that I made. Two were printed of Super High Quality mode pictures, two printed of the HQ mode pictures, and they all came out excellent, quality worth framing.

Pricing for the Olympus Camedia C2000 Zoom camera, available now, is currently $799.  I like this camera, it is easy to hold and transport and use. It has the features of a very high quality professional camera and the flexibility of working as a simple point and shoot. With images at 1600x1200, you get very high pixel resolution for printing and enlarging and it is versatile enough for everyday use. Key features that are great plusses are the optical 3X zoom lens and ease of setting the features for fine-tuning an image. The excellent screen makes it easy to see your results instantly and with a stash of rechargeable batteries and memory cards, you are all set to go. Minuses I mentioned would be it’s easy to mistake the power button for the shutter release. Replacing those batteries under less than ideal conditions would be difficult, and the fact that memory cards are tiny and the lens cap will get lost unless you attach it. Finally, they really should include an AC Adapter for most people will probably use the attached cords to download pictures.

This is an excellent camera and would be suitable for a very wide range of uses from point and shoot to technically challenging photographing opportunities. I highly recommended it.

Robert Sanborn