Olympus Camedia C-840L

Olympus has always been a name linked with excellence and development in the camera arena, so it came as little surprise that the company scooped a PC Pro Quality award with its C-820L compact digital camera (reviewed issue 38, p138) and made quite a splash with its C-1400L SLR camera (reviewed issue 41, p184).

Olympus is by no means alone in its ambition to produce the best, however. In fact, Kodak has ruled the roost for some time, with its excellent DC210 featuring in the PC Pro A List until last issue (reviewed issue 40, p181). With the release of Kodak's excellent DC260 (reviewed p160) and Olympus' new challenger, the Camedia C-840L, it looks like competition in the sub-£1,000 digital camera market is about to move up a gear.

The C-840L is a good piece of design, benefiting from the obvious effort that Olympus has invested in the ergonomics. It's small compared with the bulky C-1400L and looks especially elegant when sitting next to Kodak's DC260. The right-hand side of the unit is slightly fatter than the rest of the camera, so you can get a positive grip on it, and all the controls are located in sensible positions. Put simply, holding the Olympus feels very natural and isn't an effort in contortion like the DC260.

Reviewing your stored pictures and changing the camera's settings is just as intuitive. Just press the green button next to the 2in LCD and the last image is displayed with impressive clarity. Next to this there are plus and minus keys for moving through your images and there's also the option to display Lilliputian-sized thumbnails. This option definitely isn't one for the visually challenged, though. Trying to make out six pictures on a 2in screen can be something of a strain on the eyes.

The menu system also allows some control and variation over the sort of photograph you can take. There's a Sequence mode which allows between six and ten images to be captured at intervals of around two seconds per frame. The number of pictures taken in this mode depends, obviously, on the quality level that's set. There's also a digital Tele/Wide setting that effectively crops a subject image to make it appear twice the width. It's also possible to toggle between Macro mode for taking smaller images close up and standard settings for working at distances ranging from 500mm to infinity.

The Olympus stores photographs on a 4Mb CompactFlash card that's supplied with the camera, and only has room enough for nine images in Super High Quality mode (1,280 x 960). You can, however, work at the same resolution and store 18 pictures by using the High Quality setting, which uses a higher compression ratio. If you're not worried about always using the highest image quality you can store up to 30 in the Standard Quality mode at 640 x 480 resolution.

When working in the best quality setting, you shouldn't have anything to complain about. It's a very close-run race between the Olympus and the Kodak DC-260 for the honours, but in a direct comparison it appears the Kodak has a slight edge in terms of the level of detail captured. As you'd expect, the higher resolution 1.6 million pixel CCD in the DC260 produces crisper results than the 1.3 million pixel device in the Camedia.

As for allowing the Olympus a little compression of the picture to save storage space, results are impressive. In fact, I was hard pushed to discern the difference between pictures taken with Super High Quality and High Quality settings. Only very close examination revealed the artefacts created by JPEG compression.