Olympus Camedia C-800L

Olympus' Camedia C-800L is currently the highest resolution sub-£1,000 digital camera available. Its 810,000 pixel 1/3in CCD sensor gives it an impressive resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels, which is a few hundred pixels more than the competition in either dimension.

An attractive device, the Olympus is a little larger than a traditional 35mm compact, and is finished in pale gold-brushed aluminium and leather-effect grey plastic. A sliding cover, a feature surprisingly missing on some top-end cameras, protects the lens and doubles as a power switch.

The back of the camera has a viewfinder and a 4.5cm TFT display, together with basic controls for the viewfinder. Simple push-button controls for selecting image quality, flash mode, macro and a few other options are on the top, along with the shutter release and an LCD status panel. If you turn on the LCD panel with the camera off, the photos in memory are displayed; use the LCD panel with the camera on and it shows a real-time view of what the lens is seeing.

As you'd expect from Olympus, the lens is good. It's a five-element design including an aspherical element. Olympus quotes a 100 lines/mm resolution, which is about double that of a compact camera. The lens' 5mm focal length is equivalent to a 36mm-wide angle on a 35mm camera. It operates at f/2.8, f/5.6 and f/11, with a mechanical shutter ranging from 1/8th to 1/500th second. Focus stretches from 0.5m to infinity, and there's a macro mode that operates from 0.2m to 0.5m. The lens is somewhat recessed into the camera body and shouldn't need a lens hood, but in any case there are no provisions for fitting one of these or any filters.

There's a tripod mount on the bottom of the camera, which you'll need at 1/8th. It also sports a built-in flash which can be used in auto mode or as an anti-red eye or fill-in device, and it has a range of about 2.4m. There's a 12-second self-timer for taking shots of yourself, too.

Olympus provides its own software with the C-800L. This downloads thumbnail images, each taking about three seconds, and saves files as JPEG (low, medium and high compression), TIF, BMP and J6I. It can also fully control the camera and all its settings. A high-quality (1,024 « 768) low-compression JPEG file takes about 400-500Kb of disk space. The combination of a quality lens and high-resolution sensor certainly pays off; image quality is, for a digital camera, excellent, with good colour balance and resolution of fine detail. Performance is even good in low light.

You can monitor what the camera sees on the PC screen, and even take pictures by remote control. The supplied lead is only a few feet long but the connection is via a standard nine-pin serial lead, so an extension would be easy to organise. Downloading each full image takes about a minute.

The supplied utility is standalone rather than a TWAIN module. If you want to modify an image you have to download and save it using this before loading it into your own image-editing software. You can't pull an image into Photoshop, for instance, straight from the camera. The Olympus utility gives very basic facilities like rotate, flip and primitive tone control.

In addition to transferring to a PC, the C-800L can be linked directly to Olympus' optional P-150E 148dpi dye sublimation printer. But at £500 for the printer, and 80p per A6 sheet of paper, this isn't a way to produce cheap photos.

The Olympus' 6Mb memory can hold 30 high-quality images or 120 standard-quality (512 « 384 pixel) images. At the camera's price point, I'd expect some sort of memory-expansion capability, but it doesn't have any. A PC Card slot, or one of the newer small memory card slots, would add a lot of versatility. Canon's Powershot 600 takes RAM cards or PC Card hard drives. Also, it's a shame that the lens, while of a high quality, is of fixed focal length.