Product Reviews

Too often, budget digital cameras have light sensors that are too small to capture high detail. It shouldn't be like this. Just because you don't need fancy functions, doesn't mean you want your photos to look cheap. Olympus seems to think so too - it's C-180 is a 5.1 megapixel camera that costs only £109.

For a budget digital camera to be worthwhile, it has to take good pictures with minimum intervention by the photographer. The C-180 is certainly easy to use. It's seven scene and two camera modes are easily accessed through a rotating dial at the back of the camera. A second cluster of buttons gives you control over flash, macro and timer options.

The C-180 doesn't have that many fancy features. There's no optical viewfinder, so you have to use the small, 1.5 inch LCD screen. This will be a pain when it's really sunny, as bright light makes it difficult to see what's on an LCD. There's also

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no optical zoom; using the 4x digital zoom will get you closer to the action but only by significantly downgrading the image quality. The 14MB of built-in memory stores three pictures at super-high quality and 11 at high quality - so you will need to invest in a memory card.

The camera also lacks some of the more precise manual controls that would allow you to get good results in challenging conditions. There is, for instance, no aperture control. Instead you get the choice between full auto or auto with an option to brighten or darken the image. This makes it difficult to get good results when you can't use the flash - for instance, in museums, or when shooting in macro mode (flash often bleaches out the image close up).

Exposure isn't entirely reliable, either. Indoor and outdoor images are often dull or underexposed, and it struggles with high-contrast scenes. There's also clearly visible JPEG compression in many pictures (blockiness due to the image file being shrunk to fit it onto the memory card). This is disappointing in a camera with such a large CCD light sensor. Images taken at high resolution often also look as if they've been digitally altered to appear sharper.

The C-180 is cheap and easy to use, but the lack of optical zoom and viewfinder, as well as any kind of manual control, make getting good results in challenging lighting conditions difficult. Despite its high pixel count and low price, the C-180's results are too variable for us to recommend it.