WHAT'S HOT: The 2.1-megapixel Olympus Camedia D-490 Zoom offers impressive quality for its price. It packs a 3X optical zoom lens (equivalent to a 35mm-105mm zoom lens), and 2.5X digital zoom, as well as a macro mode for shooting tiny objects. Like the less-expensive Olympus D-360L, this camera can take panoramic pictures, and it has a shutter speed range of 1/2 second to 1/1000 second. It also gives you manual focus.

The D-490 Zoom improves on its sibling in several other areas, most happily in battery life: It held out for 127 shots over 2.2 hours of use in our tests. The camera also produced pleasing prints among the sub-$500 cameras, rivaling those we've seen made from cameras priced in the $800-to-$1000 range. In our test shots, edges were slightly soft, but the D-490 Zoom captured admirably accurate colors and variations in tone, even in dark areas.

WHAT'S NOT: Despite its improvements over previous models, the D-490 Zoom still uses a relatively slow serial connection for downloading images to your PC. The labels for picture quality settings are too confusing, and the manual will stump novices in some places (where it refers to the camera's LCD as a status panel and playback as a shooting mode, for example).

In addition, when you try to close the lens cover, it tends to hit the lens as the lens retracts into the camera body. Whether that's a recipe for mechanical problems down the road is hard to tell, but it is a bit irritating.

WHAT ELSE: In our tests, the D-490 Zoom fit one high-resolution image on its 8MB SmartMedia card at a time, and 82 low-resolution (640-by-480) images. The camera saves images as either JPEGs or TIFFs, and it can create QuickTime videos from 15 seconds long to 60 seconds long, at 15 frames per second.

BEST USE: Shutterbugs willing to spend a little more will get a versatile camera with solid color reproduction.

SUMMARY

Olympus Camedia D-490 Zoom 2.1 megapixels, 1600 by 1200 maximum resolution, 35mm to 105mm focal range, f2.8 to f11 aperture range, shutter speed from 1/2 second to 1/1000 second, self-timer, optical and LCD viewfinders, serial connection, NTSC and PAL video outputs, bundled 8MB SmartMedia card, four AA batteries, 9.5 ounces with batteries, Olympus Camedia Master 2.0 software. One-year parts and labor warranty; toll-free support for 13 hours on weekdays. $449 888/553-4448 www.olympusamerica.com/digital