Olympus C-2000 Zoom
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I've had this little camera for less than a week, so please keep this in mind as you read the following. I'll keep it updated as I get more experience with the camera.
So far I've managed to make a handful (about 200) of photographs with the C-2000. Despite some initial frustrations, the camera has proven to be easy to learn and to use.
What follows is a rather nit-picky review. Don't let it fool you into thinking that I don't like this camera - I like it a lot. To be honest, I'm hoping that a nit-picking review that reveals every little fault will perhaps provoke the manufacturers of digital cameras into making them into *real* cameras, and not gee-whizzy electronic devices that happen to function as cameras. There's a 100 year history of camera development - development of the interface, handling characteristics, and design of cameras - that's been largely ignored by the makers of digital cameras, with the result that digital cameras often suffer from egregious flaws that even the simplest point and shoot manages to avoid.
Image Quality
Image quality is where this camera has given me a pleasant surprise. With it's relatively fast f/2.0-2.8 lens, it does well *without* the flash even in relatively low light situations. Images made in those low light situations seem to be a little noisier than those made in excellent light, but the color fidelity and color saturation remain good. With a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 and a good lens, the images are far superior to those from the earlier digital cameras I've seen.
Size/Weight/Shape/Construction
Olympus list the size of the C-2000 Zoom as 4.2" x 2.9" x 2.6" (108mm x 74mm x 66mm), which works out to a pretty small package. They list the weight as 10.8 ounces (306 grams) without batteries, a statistic about as useful as me claiming that I weigh 110 lbs without any body fat or internal organs. The real weight is 15.3 ounces (434 grams) including four NiMH AA batteries, the camera strap supplied by Olympus, and the lens cap.
The camera is shaped rather like a modern battery powered SLR without a bulge on top for the prism, with a bulge where the batteries go. This bulge forms a grip which makes the camera easy to hold. It's quite a small camera, and people with very large hands might find it a bit tiny. My hands are about average size, perhaps a bit small, and I find it just about right. Left-eyed photographers will be pleased to find that the viewfinder is located far enough to the left to be used left-eyed without crushing your right hand into your nose, but chagrined to find that using the viewfinder left-eyed means pressing your smearing nose grease all over the LCD display.
The unit seems well constructed. I've not dropped mine nor subjected it to real abuse, but it seems likely to hold up to the normal rigors of being carried around, etc. There are no parts that stick out and are obvious candidates for getting bumped, snagged, or otherwise subjected to stress-induced breakage.
There's a 1/4-20 threaded tripod socket on the bottom of the camera so that you can mount the camera on a normal photographic tripod head. For some strange reason, Olympus saw fit to put the tripod socket about 1/2 inch from the battery compartment door, which means that if you use ANY tripod quick-release system you're probably going to have to remove the quick release plate to change the batteries. Since changing the batteries is the moral equivalent of loading film into the camera, this seems like a poorly thought out design decision. With luck, the clever folks at Really Right Stuff will come up with a Arca-Swiss style plate for this camera which avoids this problem.
Power
The C-2000 Zoom is powered by four AA sized batteries. At first glance, it would seem to conform to Butzi's First Law of Battery Operated Devices - "All battery powered devices must be powered by AA, C, or D sized batteries which are available at 7-11 at 3am on a Monday Morning." Alas, this is not quite true - four AA alkaline batteries will power the camera for a total of about 15 minutes - just long enough to tantalize you. When the batteries are no longer capable of driving the camera, there still seems to be quite a bit of charge in the batteries. I assume this is a result of the current demand of the camera.
With the camera, I purchased one set of NiMH AA batteries; another set came with the camera. The NiMH batteries run the camera long enough to make several dozen exposures.
The door to the battery compartment is a bit fiddly - the spring loading to make sure good contact is made with the batteries is strong enough so that you have to exert some definite force the close the battery cover and hold it closed while you work the locking mechanism.
Shutter release
The shutter release is located on top of the right hand side of the camera, where it is easily used with your right forefinger. Like many modern cameras, depressing the shutter release halfway activates focus and exposure lock, and depressing past this first bit of resistance makes an exposure. Unless you have the camera set to make annoying beep noises, the shutter and shutter release are nearly silent (this is a Good Thing). The shutter release button has very good tactile feedback, with a nice positive click feel as you make an exposure.
There's no provision for a cable release or wired shutter release. The camera comes with an IR remote, which can either activate the normal self-timer sequence (12 seconds) or a shortened 2-second timer. If you want to be able to trip the shutter immediately you press the button on the remote, you're out of luck.
The remote release also has buttons to activate the power zoom. In Display mode, the remote can be used to select the images, etc. instead of using the on-camera controls. I suppose this might be handy if you were, say, viewing the images on a TV using the supplied cable.
Viewfinder
The C-2000 is a viewfinder camera - you can look through an optical viewfinder both to frame the image and pick the point on which the camera will auto-focus. Compared to the average point and shoot, or even the vast majority of non-SLR digital cameras, the C-2000 viewfinder is excellent. The image is sharp, reasonably bright, and the viewfinder zooms as you adjust the focal length of the lens. The image magnification varies as you zoom, varying from about .8x at the long end of the zoom range down to perhaps .5x at the wide end. At the long end it's fairly easy to use the viewfinder with both eyes open. At the wide end, it's fairly difficult.
The viewfinder framing is reasonably accurate at distances longer than perhaps six feet (two meters) but suffers badly from parallax error at closer distances. This seemingly horrible problem is solved by using the LCD display in real-time to frame images when parallax or exact framing is an issue. The LCD display is crisp and bright (even in bright ambient lighting) so other than the power drain of using the LCD display, there's no problem with this.
Aficionados of rangefinder 35mm cameras such as a Leica M series camera will find the viewfinder a bit disappointing. Eye relief is good, but the exit pupil is small, requiring you to have your eye carefully aligned with the viewfinder axis to be able to see anything at all. Compared to an M series Leica, the viewfinder image is small. The edges of the viewfinder image frame the image, rather than framelines, so that you can't see any of the area surrounding the image area.
No information (shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, frame number, etc.) is displayed in the viewfinder.
Memory
The storage medium for the C-2000 is 3.3 volt SmartMedia Cards. Currently, you can buy them in sizes ranging from 8Mb to 32Mb, and the camera comes with an 8Mb card. An 8Mb card is large enough to hold 15 1600x1200 images with the what appears to be the highest comrpression setting, or 1 image with no compression at all. The number of images you can get into the card varies depending on how the images compress, of course. 64Mb SmartMedia cards are expected to hit the market in the next month.
Lens
Not surprisingly, the C-2000 Zoom has a zoom lens, with a range of focal lengths from 6.5mm to 19.5mm, more or less equivalent to a 35-105mm zoom on a 35mm camera (remember that the aspect ration on a full-frame 35mm camera is 2:3, whereas the aspect ratio of the images made by the C-2000 is 4:5). The widest available aperture is f/2.0 at 6.5mm, and f/2.8 at 19.5mm. The lens design is eight elements in six groups, and Olympus mention that the design is 'aspheric glass'
At 6.5mm, the lens displays a fair (but perhaps not obnoxious) amount of barrel distortion. In the accompanying photo, notice how the straight lines of the rows of bricks seem to bend toward the edges of the frame in the center. If I had picked a subject with less obvious lines in it, this distortion would be less apparent. If I had picked a subject with even more obvious parallel lines (such as a building) they might be even more apparent than with the brick.
At around 13mm, the lens seems fairly free from distortion. In this photo, the slight convergence of the parallel lines of the rows of brick is caused by my carelessly not having the camera square to the face of the chimney, not by any distortion caused by the lens.
At 19.5mm, the lens displays a very slight amount of pincushion distortion. You may need to click on the image and view the full sized version to see the distortion at all.
For normal, non-critical uses, the amount of distortion at all focal lengths is unlikely to be an issue. Most obnoxious is the barrel distortion, which is readily apparent even to the uncritical eye when you take a sequence of photographs and stitch them into a panorama.
The focal length of the zoom lens is adjusted by using a center off, left=shorter, right=longer switch that is in front of the shutter release button. The zoom changes at a fixed rate. The fixed rate of change means it takes two seconds to go from 6.5mm to 10.5mm, verging on irritatingly long. Making minor changes can be a bit fiddly. I'm at a loss to explain why cameras have powered zooms - it seems to be more of an annoyance than anything else. The motor to drive the zoom eats batteries and seems like just one more point of failure. Alas, every digital camera suffers from this misfeature. It will be nice when the digital camera manufacturers wake up and realize that a digital still camera is not a video camera that takes very short video clips, it's a still camera that does digital capture. I know of no serious still photographer who yearns for motorized zoom on a high end 35mm camera. The sooner digital cameras graduate from this silly point-and-shoot power zoom thing, the better.
In addition, there's no indication of what the focal length currently is. To top it off, the lens reverts to 6.5mm whenever the camera is shut off, so that if you consistently want to work with a longer focal length you're always adjusting it when you turn the camera on. Zooming the lens is the noisiest operation of the camera by far (with the sole exception of the 'beep', which I turned off first thing).
Despite the less than stellar interface design for the zoom, the range of focal lengths is a good one for a hand camera. Olympus have resisted the temptation to provide outrageously long focal lengths that no one will be able to handhold, and have shunted the digital zoom feature into a menu, where you must actively select it to use it.
There's an optional accessory that gives you a way to attach filters to the camera. Why they didn't just provide threads on the front of the lens, I haven't a clue. There's also no provision for attaching a lens shade - a serious omission in my opinion, especially since you won't be alerted to serious flare problems when peering through the viewfinder. I haven't yet tested the lens for flare but suspect that it's probably not particularly flare resistant.
Power switch
The power switch on the C-2000 is a small button set into the center of the control dial on the top deck of the camera. It's been carefully designed to avoid turning the camera on or off with an accidental bump. My only complaint is that to the uneducated finger, it's easily mistaken for the shutter release. I turned the camera off when intending to make exposures perhaps a dozen times in the first two days I had the camera, inventing new words each time. All it would take is a little raised bump on the power switch to make it easily distinguished from the shutter release. Sheesh.
Modes
In addition to modes to set up the camera, and to review images stored in the SmartMedia card, the camera can be operated in three modes, labeled P, A, and S.
Mode P is programmed exposure - the camera automatically selects both the shutter speed and aperture it deems most likely to result in a good photograph. I haven't bothered to work out the details of the program, but it appears to try to avoid camera shake by using faster shutter speeds, and appears to try to keep the aperture in a reasonable range. In addition to adjusting the shutter speed and aperture, the camera also appears to fiddle with the sensitivity (aka ISO) setting, although I haven't quite figured that part out yet.
In the A mode, you select the aperture, and the camera sets the shutter speed automatically. The aperture is selected using the up and down portions of the toggle switch pad on the back of the camera, running the selected aperture up or down from f/2.0 to f/11 in increments of 1/3rd stop.
In the S mode, you select the shutter speed, and the camera selects the appropriate aperture. Like the aperture in A mode, the shutter speed in S mode is selected using the toggle switch pad on the back of the camera, and the available shutter speed ranges from 1/2 second up to 1/800 second in 1/3 stop increments. If you set the shutter speed to 1/2 second, and then hold the 'ok' button down while using the toggle switch, you can get access to shutter speeds from 1 to 16 seconds. This feature is undocumented, and, I presume, unsupported. Hitting the 'OK' button when in the long exposure range toggles the aperture back and forth between wide open and fully closed down, the only two choices.
The toggle switch pad is located on the back where it's easy to use it with your thumb while looking through the viewfinder. Alas, there's no shutter speed or aperture display in the viewfinder, and it's distressingly easy to accidentally adjust the exposure compensation when adjusting the aperture or shutter speed, and since there's no indication that you've done this in the viewfinder, you'd never know unless you look at the top display or the LCD display. Those two problems make it difficult to make on the fly aperture or shutter speed decisions.
Autofocus
The C2000 Zoom has autofocus. In the normal mode, the camera will focus (with reasonable swiftness and accuracy) from 31" (.8m) to infinity. In macro mode, the camera will focus from 8" to 31" (20cm to 80cm). In macro mode, the focus and framing are displayed on the LCD monitor, since parallax error renders the viewfinder useless. The camera also offers a mode where the focus is set to either 8 ft (2.5m) or infinity.
