Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom

[ia] Designed to appeal to photographers who want a lightweight compact digicam with a solid feel and extensive suite of user controls, the Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom sits between the C-8080 and the C-5060 in the Olympus line-up. It has identical styling to the C-5060 Zoom, the same lens and flip-up-and twist LCD monitor and diopter-adjustable optical viewfinder. However, it sports a 7-megapixel sensor, although the CCD is the same size as the C-5060’s.

Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom

[ia] A distinctive shape, prominent lens, high-rising flash and smart black body give the Olympus C-8080 a quality appearance. It’s also distinguished by the many different ways of accessing most controls, its dual CF and xD-Picture card support, and excellent optics. The C-8080’s lens is built to the same standard as the Zuiko lenses made for E System cameras, but manual focusing is via a button control and zooming is lever-operated. The 1.8-inch ‘sunshine colour’ LCD monitor is mounted on a swing-out hinge but it can only be tilted through about 45 degrees. A neat ‘direct histogram’ uses a coloured grid to indicate areas of the displayed image that are overexposed (red) or underexposed (blue), allowing users to fine-tune exposure levels.

DIY Gigapixel panoramas

In the mid-1980s a young photographer called Ken Duncan bought himself a clunking hulk of a camera called a Widelux, sweet-talked some film out of Fujifilm, took out a mortgage on his house, bought himself a 4-wheel drive and embarked on a trip around Australia to take some panoramic landscapes. The rest, as they say, is history.

Olympus C-5060 Wide Zoom

As well as a 5-megapixel sensor and 27-110mm equivalent zoom lens, the Camedia C-5060 Wide Zoom offers just about every control a photographer could require, including RAW and TIFF capture settings. The standard P, A, S and M shooting modes are augmented by five scene settings and program shift is available with the A and S modes.

Nikon Coolpix 8800

Nikon’s Coolpix 8800 replaces the 8700 at the top of the Coolpix line-up and is the first Coolpix model with Vibration Reduction (VR). Apart from its 10x zoom lens, the 8800 is almost identical to the 8400, with the same sensor and image processor, the same resolution/compression settings and the same controls and shooting modes for both still and video capture. Their control layouts are also similar, although the MF/AF button on the 8800 is on the lens barrel instead of the camera body.