Olympus C2020 Digital Zoom Camera
The styling on the C2020 is a sure winner. It looks like a miniature traditional SLR that fits in one hand, and its front grip makes it easy to hold. The C2020's menu system is fairly easy to use, although you might have to refer to the manual to find out what the cryptic abbreviations, such as WB (white balance) and Q (quality setting) mean. The C2020 packs a powerful 3x zoom lens and offers an excellent resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 pixels. (You can also set it for lower resolutions.) Its large half-inch CCD produces incredibly sharp, colorful pictures. While most settings use the JPEG format, this camera also has an uncompressed TIFF format for high-end, ultradetailed photo work. You can save your images on compact SmartMedia memory cards. Olympus manages to marry high-end manual controls with more consumer-oriented, popular features in the C2020. This digital camera offers superb creative control, featuring traditional aperture- and shutter-priority modes, as well as a full manual setting. The C2020 shows both aperture and shutter speed on the display in all modes, as well as a quick-adjust exposure compensation--one of the most useful displays we've seen. This lets you change settings more quickly and easily than even a traditional SLR film camera will allow. The C2020 also offers a macro setting for close-up work. It gives you a spot-metering option for tricky exposures as well; its advanced TTL matrix metering worked very well for most of our scene exposures. In addition, the C2020 has a new black-and-white mode and a new movie mode, which lets you take up to 60 seconds of QuickTime video (without sound). Overall, we were very pleased with the Olympus C2020's performance--while it offers high-end creative control, it's also easy enough for a novice to use. Its compact size and great styling were big plusses as well. The only drawback we experienced was its tendency, as with all digital cameras, to drain batteries very quickly--we'd recommend investing in a set of rechargeable AAs. |
Following in the tradition of the popular C2000 Zoom, Olympus's
C2020 Zoom offers high-performance digital imaging in a compact, great-looking body.