Olympus Camedia C-760 Ultra Zoom
Olympus has been making superzoom cameras (which we define as cameras with an optical zoom lens of 12X or greater) for some time. Its Ultra Zoom C-765 recently won our Editors' Choice in the category, thanks to good image quality and compact design. Olympus has since expanded it the Ultra Zoom line with the 4-megapixel C-770, which adds better video, a twin-bulb f
lash, a hot shoe, and more metal on the body for $100 more. But the C-770 unfortunately suffers from many of the C-765's limitations, including mediocre speed and the lack of both lamp-assisted autofocus and optical image stabilization (recommended for shooting at over 7X zoom without a tripod). Surprisingly, the C-770 also scored slightly lower than the C-765 in our resolution tests, despite having the same optics and image sensor, perhaps because of production-line variations. Boxy yet comfortable, the smallish C-770 is easy to hold and suited to one-handed shooting. The f/2.8 to f/3.7, 6.3mm to 63mm (38mm to 380mm, 35mm equivalent) zoom lens is smooth, responsive, and can be easily operated via the rocker control near the shutter button. Users can access an impressive array of manual controls, but these are often buried in cryptic menus. Olympus should take note of Kodak and Casio's excellent, detailed menus. The C-770's rear panel has a slider switch for moving among still-capture, playback, and video-recording modes. A button lets you toggle between the clear, bright electronic viewfinder (with diopter) and the crisp 1.8-inch LCD. There's also a Quick Review button (for fast playback) and a set of three buttons to control autoexposure lock, timer/remote, and flash selection. These buttons toggle to other functions in playback mode. We'd prefer analog controls for things like manual focus and macro selection. Sophisticated users will appreciate options for metering, white balance, EV compensation, ISO selection, and TIFF or JPEG choices in seven resolutions (640-by-480 to 2,288-by-1,712) and four compression levels. The C-770 can shoot MPEG-4 video at 640-by-480, limited only by available memory. It ships with a 16MB SD media card and a lithium ion battery and recharger. Lab results were good for this class of camera, with 1,150 resolvable lines and 2 percent pixel transition average. With the camera in fully automatic mode, we noted some blowout in whites in both our simulated daylight and flash invoked still life studies, but otherwise the images were crisp and bright, with good colors. We didn't observe similar exposure issues with the C-765; the C-770's stronger flash may have caused the problem. On the downside, the C-770's performance was slow. Given its 7.72-second boot-up time and 2.5-second recycle, you may want to leave the camera turned on for spontaneous shooting. If you need a hot shoe and a stronger flash and better video capabilities than the C-765 offers, the C-770 is a good buy. Otherwise, save the $100 and get the C-765.
