Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,39186610,00.htm

Reviewed 25 October 2004

Reviewed by David D. Busch

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 30mm make the 4-megapixel Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom a camera that enthusiasts can use for serious work. Its ability to save photos in TIFF format, its hot shoe for mounting an external flash, and its robust MPEG-4 moviemaking capabilities add to its appeal for the dedicated photographer. Yet you don't have to be experienced 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 about £30 less.

Design
Fairly compact for an electronic viewfinder (EVF) camera at 340g and about 100 by 60 by 70mm, 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 around 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 hot shoe is covered by a sliding plastic insert that proved too easy to knock loose accidentally. The back panel is sparsely covered with 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 serve multiple functions, depending on your current mode. One locks autoexposure, activates any of 19 camera features, or rotates vertically orientated pictures. The second activates the timer or the separate remote control and bins unwanted pictures immediately after a shot, while the third changes flash mode or, during playback, protects the currently viewed image from being accidentally erased. There's also a quick-review button, a key for switching between the EVF and the back-mounted 4.5cm LCD, a sliding diopter control next to the viewfinder, and a button that pops the flash up.

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.

Features
Much of the Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom's appeal is due to its 10x optical zoom, which, despite its reach, protrudes less than 50mm 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 prime 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 enlargements 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 70mm in standard macro mode or an intimidating 120mm 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 centre-weighted. The dozen automatic scene modes include Portrait, Sport, 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 timer is augmented by a 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 print your shots yourself with a PictBridge capable printer or format orders for printout by a third-party service.

Movie buffs will drool 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.

Performance
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 contrasting 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 unfavourable lighting.

In single-shot mode, the Olympus was able to snap an image every 2.6 seconds without a flash, which is about average, and once every 5.6 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 its powering-up time was more than 6 seconds.

We liked the electronic viewfinder, but it tended to freeze and display streaks, to dim and to black out just before, during, and after exposure. The rear LCD exhibited the same behaviour 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 0.3 to 4.5m at the wide-angle setting, and 1.2 to 5.1m 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 overexpose 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.

Edited by: Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by: Tom Espiner