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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 54 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Full manual controls; versatile 10X optical zoom; solid battery life; excellent macro capabilities; decent image quality; simple operation; high-quality motion pictures.
The bad: No raw format; slow autofocus under low-contrast lighting.
The bottom line: Enthusiasts will love this camera's full manual control over exposure and focus, 10X optical zoom, and Super Macro capabilities, but it offers enough automation to soothe neophytes, too.
Specifications: Digital camera type: Full body ; Resolution: 4 megapixels ; Optical zoom: 10 x ; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 10/25/2004
- Released on: 05/01/2004
At first glance, it looks like the only other feature on top of the camera is a knurled mode dial; the pop-up flash unit is flush with the surface when retracted, and the hotshoe is covered by a sliding plastic insert that proved too easy to knock loose accidentally. The back panel is populated with a minimal number of controls, most of which reduce the clutter by doing triple or quadruple duty. For example, a single sliding switch serves to power up the camera and to alternate between the playback, recording, and movie modes. A triad of buttons next to the EVF eyepiece also serves multiple functions, depending on your current mode. One locks autoexposure, activates any of 19 camera features, or autorotates vertically oriented pictures. The second activates the self-timer or the separate remote control and trashes unwanted pictures immediately after a shot, while the third changes flash mode or, during playback, protects the currently viewed image from accidental erasure.
There's also a quick-review button, a key for switching between the EVF and the back-mounted 1.8-inch LCD, a sliding diopter control next to the viewfinder, and a button that pops up the flash. The four-way cursor keys with a central OK/Menu button allow you to navigate through the menus and give you quick access to a few frequently used settings, including exposure compensation.
Enthusiasts will appreciate how easy the manual controls are to use. Once your aperture-priority, shutter-priority, or full manual exposure has been set, the f-stop and the shutter speed (or both, in manual mode) can be set by pressing the left/right and up/down cursor keys. To focus manually, you simply hold down the Menu key for longer than a second, and a focusing scale will appear on the LCD. Press the up/down keys to focus, or the left/right keys to switch between manual and autofocus. In manual focus mode, an enlarged view appears in the center of the EVF or rear LCD. Much of the Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom's appeal relates to its 10X optical zoom, which, despite its reach, protrudes less than 2 inches from the camera body. With an f/2.8 maximum aperture when set at 38mm, its widest angle (35mm-camera equivalent), the lens retains a respectable f/3.7 opening even at the 380mm (equivalent) top end, making this a primo optic for the sports photography workout we gave it. You may find the 38mm wide-angle view a bit limiting in tight quarters, however.
Olympus touts its 4X Super Zoom feature, which simply crops a 1,600x1,200 chunk out of the middle of the frame and wasn't really much better than a standard digital zoom that fills the frame by upsampling a smaller section of the sensor's pixels. You can probably do better blowups in your image editor.
If simple optical magnification doesn't float your boat, you can get large-scale views of your subjects by moving in to as close as 2.8 inches in standard macro mode or an intimidating 0.5 inch in Olympus's Super Macro mode, using automatic or manual focus.
The C-770 Ultra Zoom's shutter speeds range from 1/1,000 second to 0.5 second in automatic modes and down to 16 seconds in manual mode. Apertures ranging from f/2.8 to f/8 are available too, and light sensitivity can be set automatically or manually, from ISO 64 to ISO 400. Metering options include eight-point multisegment, spot, and center-weighted. The dozen automatic scene modes include Portrait, Sports, Landscape, Night Scene, and Self-Portrait options.
The panorama mode can align as many as 10 pictures for later stitching in software, and there's a two-in-one option to combine a pair of images in a single frame--both are handy and easy to use. The 12-second self-timer is augmented by an included remote control, which worked well up to about 15 feet from the camera. The C-770 Ultra Zoom is both PictBridge and DPOF compatible, so you can direct-print your shots yourself with a PictBridge-capable printer or format orders for printout by a third-party service.
Movie buffs will go ape over the C-770 Ultra Zoom's MPEG-4 capabilities, which provide 640x480-pixel capture at a smooth 30fps, with decent audio, for as long as your xD-Picture Card holds out.
On the basis of its lens alone, the Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom begs to be used for sports photography, and it didn't disappoint. While the shutter lag of 0.9 second under contrasty lighting conditions caused us to miss a few critical moments, we had better luck switching to low-speed burst mode, pressing the shutter release just before the action began, and cranking out nine full-resolution pictures in less than 5 seconds. In high-speed burst mode, with the resolution reduced to 640x480 pixels, we captured five shots in a blazing 1.9 seconds. But action photography under dreary, low-contrast conditions is likely to be frustrating. The C-770 Ultra Zoom took 2.9 seconds to squeeze off a shot under that unfavorable lighting.In single-shot mode, the Olympus was able to snap an image every 2.6 seconds without flash, which is about average, and once every 5.57 seconds with the flash turned on, which is a little slow. A green indicator in the viewfinder shows when the camera's buffer memory fills during shooting and indicates when the current images have been saved to the memory card. Saving images in TIFF format results in a long, 12-second wait between shots. And you'd better keep this camera switched on and ready for action because wake-up time was more than 6 seconds.
We liked the electronic viewfinder, but it tended to freeze; display streaks; dim; and black out just before, during, and after exposure. The rear LCD exhibited the same behavior but we didn't use it much because it was more difficult to view outdoors under bright light.
The muscular flash unit's range extends from about 1 to 15 feet at the wide-angle setting, and 4 to 17 feet in telephoto mode, both at ISO 100.
The quality of our test photos from the Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom was generally very good, with consistent exposures, lots of detail in the shadows, and little tendency to blow out highlights. Indoors, the automatic white balance sometimes gave us extrawarm exposures, but noise wasn't a significant problem until the light sensitivity setting was bumped up to ISO 400.User reviews
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