CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 12/03/2004
- Released on: 10/15/2004
Editor's note: We have changed the rating in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Click here to find out more.
The Olympus C-7000Z's 4.0-by-2.0-by-1.7-inch, titanium-finish aluminum body weighs a solid nine ounces with its xD-Picture Card and battery loaded but feels well-balanced enough to encourage one-handed shooting. Your right hand can curl comfortably around its rounded-rectangle contours to depress the power button or slide over to operate the shutter release and the concentrically mounted zoom lever with an index finger while you're sighting through the optical viewfinder. A knurled dial fits under your thumb and can be easily twirled to switch among exposure modes, including programmed, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and manual, as well as scene and user-definable settings.Considering all the options and features stuffed into this camera, the back panel is surprisingly clean. To the right of the optical viewfinder, a trio of buttons each handles multiple functions. One selects autoexposure or autofocus modes and deletes photos during review. Another activates the self-timer and remote control options or tags a picture for printing. The third cycles between flash functions and also protects a displayed image from accidental deletion.
Next to the 2-inch LCD are a Quick View button and an exposure lock key to which you can assign a second function--say, to toggle noise reduction, change the quality level, adjust the white balance, or switch the live histogram on or off.
Aside from a button that flips the flash unit up, the only other control is a four-way cursor pad with an embedded Menu button. As with other Olympus cameras, the C-7000Z even lets you customize the top-level menus that appear when this button is depressed. It displays the mode/setup menu and the monitor on/off controls by default, but the other two menu positions can be defined with any of 23 functions, including macro, burst/time-lapse, ISO, scene, flash adjustments, noise reduction, digital zoom, autofocus, panorama, white balance, sharpness, contrast, or saturation.
For the photo enthusiast, control is the name of the game, and the Olympus C-7000Z offers total command of most functions. The basics are there, such as shutter- and aperture-priority modes. You can directly select apertures from f/2.8 to f/8 in 1/3-stop increments and shutter speeds from 1/2,000 second to 15 seconds. The camera is willing to take over the focusing and exposure chores for you, but you can retain control over the autofocus area by using the cursor keys or by selecting spot or full-area autofocus. Choose from spot or center-weighted metering or eight-point multi-area autoexposure. Preview your tonal values with the live histogram on the LCD, then adjust camera-selected exposures over a range of plus or minus 2EV in 1/3EV increments. In addition to automatic ISO speed selection, you can choose from settings between ISO 80 to ISO 400. With so much control at your fingertips, an advanced user probably wouldn't opt to use scene modes very often, and the C-7000Z provides only the basics: Sport, Portrait, Night Scene, Landscape, and Landscape Portrait.The C-7000Z's 38mm-to-190mm (35mm equivalent) zoom focuses as close as two feet in manual mode, four inches in macro mode, and less than one inch in Super Macro mode. However, the lack of a true wide-angle lens or support for add-on lenses hinders the lens's versatility. Manual focusing is a snap, too, or as much of a snap as it can be without a manual focus ring on the lens barrel. You simply hold down the Menu button for more than a second, then depress the cursor keys to adjust the focus. A magnified area pops up in the middle of the bright, 206,000-pixel LCD to help you focus more accurately. Or you can use the on-screen bar scale to estimate the focus point.
Choices don't stop at the basic shooting options. The camera supports JPEG, TIFF, and raw file formats. You can edit the raw data of a photo right in the camera, adjusting parameters such as white balance, sharpness, or image tones, then save a copy of the file in JPEG format. You can also reduce the resolution of an image, apply a red-eye fix, or crop photos in the camera. Whether you're a fan of 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratios, this Olympus gives you both at most picture-quality levels. For example, you can select either 3,072x2,304 (7.1 megapixels) or 3,072x2,048 formats (6.2 megapixels), depending on which better suits your eventual hard copy requirements for an uncropped image.
The electronic flash range extends from 6 inches to a reasonable 12.5 feet at the shortest focal length (on Auto ISO) but no farther than 7.2 feet when the lens is cranked out to the telephoto position. The C-7000Z offers both front-curtain and rear-curtain slow-sync flash options to let you capture the background using ambient light during flash exposures, or front-curtain slow sync with red-eye prevention.
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