Near professional digicam (Olympus Camedia C-2020 Zoom)

Name: dmullier

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Product:	Olympus Camedia C-2020 Zoom
Date:	12/08/00 (283 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Has manual apature and shutter controls which is a must for "proper photography" I've got rid of my expensive SLR

Disadvantages: Not the cheapest and probably not worth the money if you just want a point and shoot

The 2020 is a 2000 with all the annoying bits removed (like an off switch next to the shutter so you keep turning the camera off), with the addition of some really important features.

Quickly the features that make this camera stick out are:
1..Manual controls
apature, shutter and focus can all be controlled manually.
2..Intermediate modes
shutter and apature priority allow you to select one and the camera will automatically adjust the other for the perfect exposure.
3..Proper camera optics (no fixed-focus rubish)
4..Ability to take extra lenses and filters (needs an adapter)
5..Excellent battery consumption (compared to my old Kodak and CL1000, I can easily shoot 80+ pics on one set of NiCDs).
6..Some nifty gimmics like Video mode and a remote control.


There is one reason why I bought this camera and no other. It is fully manual and allows me to never use my Minolta Dynax SLR. It's fantastic with full control over aperture and shutter. The shutter can go as long as 16 seconds, which is a must for night time photography (unless you're one of those people that thinks that a flash will light up an entire building). It also has slow-sync flash and a nifty remote control, which I use as a quick release for long exposures.

You can open the aperture up and get some arty blurred background portrait pictures. It also has a manual focus mode, which is a must for a real camera (especially when you read reviews here of other Digicams that have difficulty focusing), exposure compensation modes and spot metering (another must in my opinion if you want something more than point and shoot).

Another strong point of this camera over most other is that you can attach other lenses (the attached lens is a 35-100mm). You need to buy an adapter for other lenses because the lens extends from the camera body when it's switched on. The expander (called the CLA-1 for some reason) puts a permanent hood
over the lens (as if it's permanently out). This makes the camera a little bigger (it is tiny otherwise) but protects the lens if you put a filter on it. I use it for a UV or poloriser, but you can attach a fairly wide variety of lenses for extra zoom or a bit of wide angle.

The panorama mode is nice too. I'm not so bothered about the movie mode, but this is the sort of thing that will sell it to the mass market.

Picture quality is excellent, 2.1 mega pixels through a high quality lens. Some lenses on digital cameras are woeful, take the Kodak fixed focus jobs (horrible). This is a real lens. The pictures are warm and focus is sharp.

The screen is very high resolution in comparison to my old CL1000 (which I also loved).

There are a few minor niggles. The screen is not recessed and so is open to scratches. I put a piece of clear sticky back plastic (get it for woolies for backing books, it comes of cleanly) to protect it but you do loose some clarity. Another minor niggle is the lack of USB, which means a 32meg card takes an hour to download, although I suppose you should be buying a card reader. Also the CLA1 adapter obstructs the flash slightly, leaving a slight shadow in the lower left corner of the picture and I don't like taking it on and off too much because it has plastic threads. Final niggle, it's not a true SLR optically (i.e. if you look through the viewfinder you will get parallax error for close up subjects). However, you soon get used to using the screen alone, which makes it a true SLR, it's ok because it is very bright (in comparison to my old Kodak DC210+ (yuk) and Oly CL1000 (love it)).

To conclude, this is my favourite thing. I go everywhere with it. Any one want to buy my Dynax (I couldn't say this with my CL1000 because it wasn't manual). I must have taken several thousand pictures with this camera and find it nice and easy to use.

I got mine for £450 after Jessops
price matched an internet site.

You can check out some pictures from the C2020 and the CL1000 by visiting my homepage http://www.mullier.co.uk/ (the 1024x768 pics are the CL1000 ones).

Summary: