Olympus Camedia C-720 3MP Digital Camera w/ 8x Optical Zoom
digital video cameras reviews
|
 |
List Price: $699.99
Features
• 3-megapixel sensor captures enough detail to create prints up to 11 x 14
• Autofocus lens with 8x optical zoom and 3x digital zoom (for 24x total zoom)
• Included 16 MB SmartMedia card holds 21 images at high quality setting
• Connects with PCs and Macs via USB port
• Uses 2 CR-V3 lithium batteries (included) or 4 AA batteries |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] |
Electronics : This item is currently not available. |
|
|
Olympus Camedia C-720 3MP Digital Camera w/ 8x Optical Zoom description
The 3-megapixel Olympus C-720 Ultra Zoom digital camera boasts an outstanding 8x optical zoom lens (plus 3.0x digital zoom--equivalent to 40-320mm in 35mm camera) and an ultracompact size (4.2 by 3 by 3 inches). The impressive aspherical glass lens gives you excellent detail and sharp, clear pictures, plus the size of the camera makes it easy to bring ... review details
|
|
Olympus Camedia C-720 3MP Digital Camera w/ 8x Optical Zoom Customer Reviews
|
|
|
|
♥♥♥♥♥ |
A Wonderful Camera (but plan on a learning curve)
|
We purchased a C-720 in 2003 and are very pleased with it.
With proper training, anyone can take awesome pictures with it. There are several reviews here that criticize the camera's "slow" auto and sports settings. I've taken probably 10,000 pictures with this camera, and almost none of them were taken in either of those modes. I highly recommend using P mode for outdoor pictures, or pictures in good light, and shutter priority (S mode), with shutter speed at about 1/30 or 1/40 of a second, and the exposure compensation on +2.0, for indoor pictures. The results are great.
The good things about this camera include the wonderful 8x zoom (for outdoor pictures, with shutter speeds of 1/250 second and faster, even max zoom shots come out great), the vibrant colors it captures, its wonderful work without a flash (very dramatic pictures), and the nice effect in portrait setting (in which it uses depth of field to have a sharp target and blurred background). The menus aren't that difficult to use. Battery life is great; I typically get 200-300 shots on one set of freshly charged NiMH batteries. My 128 Mb SmartMedia card holds about 200 pictures in the mode I use most often, and they're large enough to print sharply as 4x6 or 5x7, even after I crop a lot out of them.
There are two things I don't like about the camera.
The first is that it has a tendancy to develop "hot" or "stuck" pixels when doing a lot of shooting in low-light situations. Pixel mapping (a built-in pixel repair function) fixes this, but it's still really jarring to see ugly red and green pixels in the viewfinder and LCD and images when this happens.
The second is a quirk with my camera, and, from what I've read, lots of Olympus cameras. The C-720 uses a capacitor to "remember" the date and time, even with no batteries in the camera. There is something wrong with the capacitor in the C-720 I own. The connection to the batteries, even a freshly-charged set, breaks quite often. When that happens, the camera won't turn on until I open the battery compartment and rearrange the batteries, and then half the time, the date/time (nothing else) has been lost and needs to be reset. Because the camera cleverly uses the date to name the image files, this lost date/time is a real headache to deal with.
Because of the battery/capacitor quirk, I'm docking the camera one star. I'd give it five if the date/time didn't reset way too often.
As more and more people buy digital cameras, that are usually higher-end than the film cameras they once had, the learning curve associated with camera like this will decrease. To anyone who finds themselves disappointed with this camera because of blurred pictures, read my advice above and try again. Once you know what you're doing - it won't take long - you will take great pictures with the C-720. |
|
Olympus Camedia C-720 3MP Digital Camera w/ 8x Optical Zoom digital cameras, camcorders for sale