Product Reviews

The Camedia C-770 is Olympus's most stylish digital camera to date. It's also the most versatile, with a 10x optical zoom and full VGA resolution video recording. The stills resolution is four megapixels, which is high enough to produce sharp 10x8" prints, and the bright F2.8 lens is great in a wide range of lighting conditions.

In our tests it produced some of the most realistic colours we have seen from any camera. Outdoor shots were vivid and realistic, while indoors it made the best use of available light in a fairly gloomy basement without relying on the flash. Edges were crisp and there was no evidence of colour fringing or chromatic aberration, making this a good choice for the more ambitious amateur. The results were also free from noise - probably because of its 0.4" CCD, which is bigger than those found in most cameras at this price.

Exposure compensation is in the range +/- 2EV in 1/3EV steps, while ISO settings stretch from 64 to 400, which is now fairly standard in a mid-range camera. You might think this would tempt Olympus to narrow the range of shutter speeds, but these still cover all bases between 1/1,000 of a second to a full 16 seconds, making it well suited to sports photography, night shots and anything in between.

Videos are recorded in a separate mode to stills, but the two modes share several features, particularly where focus and exposure settings are concerned. Even the macro mode remains accessible, allowing you to record video from as close as 3cm. We were able

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to capture the veins inside an insect's wings using this mode, which was truly impressive.

Videos are shot at 30fps, but the length of clips is limited by media capacity. Still, the bundled 128MB xD card is enough to get you going, holding six-and-a-half minutes at 640x480 resolution. Refined JPEG compression means that even 4-megapixel shots of complex subjects such as library shelves were compressed to less than 1MB with no evidence of any artefacts. You can downsize in five increments to 640x480 if you want to save space, or opt for lossless TIFF compression if quality is your top priority. You can switch the image size ratio, too, from 4:3 to 3:2, which more closely mimics traditional prints.

The 1.8" LCD screen is easy to view in sunlight and displays a summary of your picture settings around the edges. It's supplemented by a slightly coarse electronic viewfinder, which dims as the lens focuses on your subject, then brightens when it's set. This is our only bone of contention with the C-770, and it could be because we were using a pre-production model. For most users it's going to be a minor issue, though, as the battery life is so good there's little reason to skimp on using the screen. We got three days' use out of a single charge.

The smart black metal case has a door to protect the USB2 connection and a mic port to supplement the built-in microphone. It's well balanced, comfortable to hold and easy to use with just one hand, thanks to the well-thought-out menu structure and the rotary scene mode selector on the top.

The C-770 isn't the first digital stills camera with 640x480 video recording. The Sanyo Xacti C1 (What's New, Shopper March 2004) produces MPEG4 video with equal success, but can't match the Olympus's performance in stills photography. Fuji's FinePix S7000 Zoom offers 640x480 video and superb stills performance but its MJPEG video compression is not as efficient as the Olympus' MPEG4 compression. While the C-770 can't replace a tape-based DV camera, it's smarter than your average stills camera and the price is reasonable for this level of quality.