Product Reviews

The tough, silver-bodied Digital 800 feels solid and, as with all Olympus's cameras, has rubber seals on all its openings to make sure water can't get in during a downpour. It's reasonably heavy for a compact camera, but it's also one of the most comfortable to hold. The rounded body and clever button placement enable you to get a firm one-handed grip without inadvertently taking a picture or switching modes.

The 3x zoom lens (38-114mm film equivalent) retracts fully into the camera body and is protected by a sliding cover. The zoom distance is just enough to help you frame your shot, but you'll still have to get closer to distant objects.

The bright, high-resolution 2.5" screen is perfect for reviewing and framing your photos, and divides the controls in two. On the right are the zoom rocker, mode dial and direction pad, and on the left the quick function buttons. As well as full auto, shutter and aperture priority modes, it has 19 scene modes. These change on-camera image processing to suit your subject as well as adjusting aperture and shutter speed. Some of these modes use the camera's highest ISO of 1,600. This is great for shooting in minimal light without resorting to the flash, but any photos captured at this sensitivity are limited to a resolution of 2,048x1,563 rather than the 8-megapixel camera's maximum of 3,264x2,448.

This

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is enough raw information to print up to A4 at 300dpi. However, the 's 21MB of internal memory can hold only five photos at its maximum resolution, so you should budget an extra £40 for an additional 512MB xD memory card.

The movie mode is less than spectacular, recording at a maximum of 15fps at up to 640x480. Cameras of this price often provide a 30fps mode, which makes for much smoother and more convincing clips. The 1,230mAh lithium battery is rated for 300 shots. This should be plenty for a full day of photography as long as you don't spend too much time reviewing your shots. A backup will cost about £25.

Olympus has realised that most people don't read the manual, so to help you in the field, the Digital 800 comes with an on-camera guide. It's structured around various shooting conditions and explains how to change the camera settings to cope with them.

While digital cameras should be easy to use, they should also be capable of taking high-quality images. The 800 does not always manage this. Exposure and white balance are expertly judged, producing rich, balanced photos with good contrast and full-bodied colours. Unfortunately, all the photos we took were spoiled to some extent by noise. This wasn't limited to the dark areas of photos, so it's likely that the noise is the product of on-camera processing routines rather than a lack of CCD sensitivity. This slightly degrades the overall sharpness of the photo and muddies fine detail and texture. In small prints this has limited impact, but it means that enlargements look less detailed than the pixel count would suggest.

Olympus's Digital 800 is very easy to use and turns out well-balanced, rich photos for small prints. Once you start making enlargements, though, the results of aggressive on-camera processing become more noticeable and detract from the photograph. For this price, we still recommend the 6-megapixel FujiFilm FinePix F10.