I've owned by C-8080 for over a year. Several months ago, I bought a Canon Rebel XT DSLR. The XT gets better resolution, focuses and stores faster, has a broader dynamic range, and slays the C8080 in medium and low light hands down. Add an image stabilized lens to the XT, and performance-wise, the C8080 gets left in dust accross the board.
But I still often I pack the C-8080 and leave the XT at home. In good light or when using flash, the C8080 takes great pictures, with very respectable resolution and clean, bright, vibrant Olympus style colors. It boasts a lens with one of the widest front diameters of all the digicams on the market (and thus captures more light), and the quality of the glass is superb. Raw mode storage is slow, but the results can be wonderful---you can sqeeze one more level of resolution and color depth from raw. Comparable pictures shot with my XT would blow up to bigger size, but the C-8080 is more than adequate for the typical 8-1/2X11's that I print at home. The C-8080 can produce fine prints in many cases at 13X19.
While not "compact," the C-8080 is a tidy, convenient, sturdy tool that is suitable for the serious photgrapher. The 28-140 mm is too short for field sports, but it's great for indoor people shots, landscapes, and the majority of common shooting situations. Autofocus is generally "fast enough." The dual memory card format offers a convenient way to organize pictures and immense storage capacity. I like the tilting viewfinder. The control layout is a bit complex, but you learn to maneuver it. It offers more precise control over shutter speed, aperture, and ISO than most digital cameras; ISO choices are, for example, 50, 64, 80, 100, 125, etc., instead of the more standard 50, 100, 200, etc. This means, among other things, when you haven't got enough light for ISO 100, you might not need to drop to ISO 200 where you will pick up more noise; instead, maybe you can capture the shot at ISO 160. Noise is typically not an issue until you are pushing ISO 200.
I wish the C-8080 offered image stabilization. I wish it did better in dim light. I wish it zoomed out to 200mm or better. But it is an easy camera to pack and operate, and in many, many situations, it does more than well enough. This is useful, quality gear that was built to last a long time. |
Olympus C-8080 8MP Digital Camera with 5x Optical Wide Zoom digital cameras, camcorders for sale