| Product: |
Olympus Camedia C-1 Zoom |
| Date: |
20/01/04 (89 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Ease of use, LCD display, fairly durable
Disadvantages: Eats Batteries, Smart Media supplied is tiny, Zoom could be better
I bought my C-1 Zoom a couple of summers ago and I think that it is a great piece of kit.
I have had the camera back to olympus on one occasion, I had let a friend borrow the camera and on return it refused to work , it just wouldnt power up no matter what. It is unknown what had happened to it but I have never personally had it go wrong on me before or since the incident and it does take a lot of batter having travelled a lot over its two year life.
The c-1 zoom is not intended as a fantastic expert camera, I think this is more of a point click and save your image camera, it is a very easy to use camera.
All you have to do is point and click the image will appear in the lcd window for a few seconds,but if you shut the lens and power up the camera you can browse all the images that you have taken.
There are three image settings (SQ,HQ and SHQ) which stand for standard quality, high quality and super high quality.
to be honest I wouldnt use the SQ setting very often as the quality is good but not great like HQ and SHQ are. the only problem is that the card supplied by olympus is only 8Mb in size and so you can only store about 8 images in SHQ mode and about 30 in HQ.
I would definately say that it would be worth your while buying a smart-media card for the camera before you buy it 64Mb or 128Mb if you can afford it which would cost about £20 for the 64 and £40 for the 128Mb card.
That way you ensure that you have enough memory for plenty of SHQ images.
another disadvantage of the camera is that the battery consumption is terrible, the camera only uses two AA batteries but it eats them like crazy. I only use the best Duracell batteries I can get but they are gone after about 30 shots. For the best results get yourself a charger and a set of those NI-MH batteries they are usually bright green not the red ones.
a couple of those last a lot longer and you can charge them when you get home.
Dont let those issues
put you off though as the camera is great, its easy to use not too heavy or large for a handbag or a pocket for that matter. The image quality is good and the ease of connection to a PC is also good with the supplied cable. In fact if your running XP then it is extra simple just plug in the camera and windows allows you to browse the smart media card like a removable hard drive which makes cut and paste so much simpler.
also even though it is called a zoom camera I think the Zoom feature could have been better. it is not bad but not massivley improved from the standard C-1
Supplied with the camera I got
a user Manual
A cable to attch the camera to a pc or video to see the photos on a TV
a USB cable to transfer the files to your PC
A CD of drivers for the camera
and a free Olympus battery (also short life span)
Overall a great little family camera to take to the beach or to the zoo for the day. A modern replacement for your old point and click 35mm
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