Olympus C-1400 L

Olympus is a well-known and well-respected name in the traditional camera marketplace and has made the move to digital with seemingly little effort. Its Camedia C-820L walked away from our Labs with a Quality award (issue 38, p138), thanks mainly to its superb 1,024 x 768 resolution image quality. Olympus' latest high-end digital offering, the Camedia C-1400 L, is capable of even better quality and boasts some impressive features.

The C-1400 L is the only digital camera I've seen that features a single-lens reflex (SLR) viewfinder, a feature you'll find on all professional and most good-quality compact cameras. It means that what you see through the viewfinder is exactly what the CCD 'sees', unlike a separate viewfinder which sees the picture you're taking from a slightly different position. The closer you get to your subject, the greater the difference between the pictures seen through the lens and a separate viewfinder.

Having been a familiar feature on 35mm compact cameras for some years, the motorised zoom lens is becoming an ever-more popular feature on high-end digital cameras. The lens on the C-1400 L is the equivalent of a 36-110mm lens on a 35mm format camera and gives you a similar range to the Kodak DC-120 (reviewed issue 38, p131). For close-up work, the macro function has an effective focus range of 30-60cm.

In terms of design, the Olympus is diametrically opposed to the DC-210, which apes traditional compact camera design with irritating fidelity. It may look outlandish - like a cross between a camera and a camcorder - but the shape of the Olympus means it fits snugly into the hand, making it extremely easy to hold and use. The shutter button sits neatly under your index finger, and a collar around it allows you to operate the zoom with the same finger.

The controls on the back panel are a little more fiddly to operate, however. A series of eight small silver buttons provides access to the timer, flash, macro, spot metering and LCD panel functions. Using the 1.8in LCD monitor in play mode you can review your pictures one by one full screen, or nine at a time in thumbnail format. It will also display the picture immediately after you've taken it for a few seconds. In capture mode, the screen displays a simple menu with which you can set the quality, exposure and time and date settings.

In last month's issue, Kodak's DC-210 won our Recommended award with its one million pixel CCD (reviewed issue 40, p183). The C-1400 L boasts an even higher resolution CCD - 1.41 million pixels - and produces accordingly impressive results. As you can see from the screen shots, the image quality produced by the Olympus C-1400 L is even better than the DC-210.

In Super High Quality mode you'll only get four frames, saved in slightly lossy JPEG format, on one of the 4Mb smart media cards supplied with the camera. Unless you examine the images very closely, however, it's very difficult to tell the difference between this and the High Quality mode, which also produces 1,280 x 1,024 resolution images using a higher level of compression. A more significant difference is that you can get up to 20 of these images onto the same smart card, which is a lot more efficient. A lower-quality mode lets you store even more images, but only produces 640 x 512 resolution images.

You can get images onto your PC in a number of ways. You can use either the TWAIN module or the dedicated software to import images into your applications via a 215Kbits/sec serial link. Alternatively, an innovative floppy disk adaptor will soon be available that lets you plug the smart card into it and transfer the images without the need for cables. Notebook users can lay their hands on a PC Card adaptor (£72) that does the job just as well.