The C960 Zoom is excellent value (Olympus Camedia C-960 Zoom)

Member Name: jfhopkin

Product:	Olympus Camedia C-960 Zoom
Date:	07/01/01 (679 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Incredible value for money; no competition in the price bracket

Disadvantages: Minor quibbles only

I'd used an Olympus C860 quite a lot, and was pretty impressed by it. Good picture quality, good specification, fairly robust, and easy to use.

I liked it so much that when I came into a little bit of money, so that I could just afford one, I decided to research further. After several weeks of searching on the UK web, looking at detailed specifications and comparing all cameras around that price bracket, the 860 was the one. Not an exciting product, but well-known and much-liked. Its specification was the best in its price range.

Then Dixons started stocking the C960Z for a few pence short of £300. It was a few quid more, but suddenly the competition looked pretty poor, and that includes the 860 itself. I made up my mind, and started the process of persuading my wife to agree to the additional 50 quid or so that would buy a 3X zoom.

If you've never used a camera with a zoom before, just assume that it's as necessary as a viewfinder or batteries. It is, frankly, bordering on the essential. And when £50 makes the difference between having a zoom and walking backwards and forwards for a decent shot, well, I'd recommend going hungry for a week to fund that extra cash.

I must say at this point that the £300 price tag is a "£100 off" deal, but it looks set to be permanent, and is even bettered by a few of the online shops, though I wouldn't personally use them for such a purchase.

The story doesn't quite end there, though. Not only is the zoom there and working, but you also get a surprisingly nice macro mode. Just today, I photographed a newspaper article, and later used the pictures on the LCD screen to follow up some references, all without even downloading to a PC.

You can even "zoom" further into a picture using the LCD, typically to check that an important portion of the picture (someone's face, for example) looks right.

Also, the general build quality of the camera is a pleasant surprise. T
he squidgy buttons on the back of the 860 have been superseded by positive clicky ones, and the whole user interface (ie the way the buttons and stuff work) is remarkably clear and quick. The thing doesn't just have a high specification for its money, it looks and feels a lot higher-priced than it is.

There are a couple of things I didn't like so much, and I include them only to show how trivial they are.

For one, the front of the camera operates as an on-off switch (itself an excellent idea), but when you close the front, it's a two-stage operation: one small click to start the lens retracting, and a long slide to move it the rest of the way. Push too far the first time, and the slider presses against the side of the lens, stopping it from retracting. I stopped doing that once I got used to it - about an hour after I got it home.

A second niggle is the battery life. This is a niggle aimed at all digital cameras in this price bracket, however, and doesn't detract from this model as a choice.

It's batteries. Anything that eats batteries like a 1.3Mpixel camera with an optical zoom and a large LCD display is bound to drain batteries pretty quickly. The C960Z is no worse than the competition in this respect.

The solution is to buy a couple of sets of rechargeables and a charger. Why on earth couldn't a charger be packaged in with all these cameras, so that there was no need to remove a set of AAs each time? I'd gladly accept the trade-off of non-replaceable batteries, and their smaller size would surely cut production costs?

Oh, and the download software could be better. Yeah, it could be Adobe Photoshop, but it isn't, so I use Photoshop instead. It works though, and has some handy little filters stuck in with it. Shame about red-eye removal - that should be better.

But I'll stop carping here. For three hundred quid you can get a camera that would be a bargain at £450, and that's what I posted t
his to tell you.

Buy one and have fun!

Summary: