Olympus C-1400L Digital Cameras

Slide it open, though, and an Olympus auto-focus zoom lens telescopes out of the front. A miniature flash head also pops out of the top of the camera body. On the back of the camera is a 39mm LCD display, a diamond of control buttons to navigate on-screen menus and an optical viewfinder. The Camedia C-220 Zoom actually has two zooms; an optical magnification of 3x from the lens, augmented by a 2.5x digital zoom, resulting in 7.5x zoom overall. The zoom control comes from a little jog-switch next to the shutter release on the top of the camera.

The camera has a two-megapixel CCD array and can take pictures up to a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, though you need to choose a lower resolution to store more than five of them on the 8 MB CompactFlash memory card supplied. It runs on two AA cells--alkaline are provided, but you could also use rechargeables. To get the images out of the camera, Olympus provides a USB lead and a copy of its Camedia Master 4 software. With Windows XP on your PC, the Camedia C-220 Zoom is recognised as a standard camera type and you can then also use the Camera and Scanner Wizard to import, view and print your pictures.

Picture quality is good, with natural, well-balanced colours and a high level of detail. Overall, this is a very good camera for its asking price, neat and with the image quality we've come to expect from Olympus. --Simon Williams