Olympus Camedia C-2040 Zoom

WHAT'S HOT:

The C-2040 offers aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full-manual exposure controls. Fifteen possible combinations of image quality and size--including a range of sizes for uncompressed TIFF pictures--should satisfy just about any photography need. The C-2040 turned in good picture quality, producing photos with good detail and accurate colors. Our outdoor scene could have been brighter and crisper, though, and a few artifacts disrupted the fine lines in our test pattern shots.

WHAT'S NOT: If you like to switch settings between shots, you may get frustrated: You must use the C-2040's menu system to change image size, jump to self-timer mode, or switch between exposure modes. Olympus also uses complex, unintuitive labels for picture settings, including names such as SHQ and SQ1--a situation made more complicated by the unit's wide range of picture sizes and compression levels. The C-2040 has passable battery life of 217 shots.

WHAT ELSE: The C-2040 lets you choose among auto-bracketing, manual focus, sequence shooting, preset white-balance options, and an auto-exposure lock. Thumb-pad buttons make scrolling through shots quick and easy. Olympus nicely incorporated controls into the camera's zoom switch: In image playback mode, you can rapidly toggle from a nine-shot thumbnail view up to a 3X magnification of one shot.

UPSHOT: The picture settings are bewildering, but the C-2040 Zoom offers very good image quality and lots of flexibility.

SUMMARY

Olympus Camedia C-2040 Zoom 2.11 megapixels, 1600 by 1200 maximum resolution, 40mm to 120mm focal range (35mm equivalent), f1.8 to f10 aperture range, shutter speeds from 16 seconds to 1/800 second, optical and LCD viewfinders, USB and video connections, 8MB SmartMedia media, two 3V disposable lithium ion or four AA batteries, 13.7 ounces with batteries, Camedia Master 2.5 software. One-year parts and labor warranty; toll-call support for 13 hours on weekdays. $449 800/622-6372 www.olympus.com