Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom

Full manual controls, a 10X optical zoom lens that's perfect for sports photography, a big, bright electronic viewfinder, and the ability to focus down to a half an inch make the 4-megapixel Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom a camera that enthusiasts can deploy for serious work. Its ability to save photos in TIFF format, its hotshoe for mounting an external flash, and its robust MPEG-4 moviemaking capabilities add to its appeal for the dedicated shooter. Yet you don't have to be an experienced photographer to take advantage of this versatile camera. A dozen automatic shooting modes; sophisticated exposure, flash, and white-balance automation; and simple controls make this Olympus a camera that a neophyte can grow with. Its chief shortcomings are its lack of a raw photo mode and its nonassisted autofocus, which dawdles under low-contrast lighting conditions. If you can live with QuickTime movies instead of MPEG-4 and can take a major performance hit in TIFF mode, the similar C-765 Ultra Zoom has most of the same goodies for $100 less.Fairly compact for an electronic viewfinder (EVF) shooter at 12 ounces and about 4 by 2.5 by 2.7 inches, the Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom has a silver-toned, metal-and-plastic body that feels solid in your hands. It's balanced well enough for one-handed shooting, although you'll probably want to brace the camera with the other hand when the lens is cranked out to the 380mm (35mm-camera equivalent) telephoto position. Still, one finger is all you need to operate this camera because the zoom lever is mounted concentrically with the shutter-release button.

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.

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