The shortcuts are a good idea, but you still have to enter the menu system and you'll probably need to adjust the shortcuts to suit your needs -- until then, you might feel you're doing more surfing than you'd like. Adjustable soft-dedicated buttons would be more convenient.
Features
The Olympus C-55 Zoom follows in the Olympus C-series tradition, which means it packs plenty of advanced features into the body of a point-and-shoot camera. Indeed, the C-55 has an impressive range of features for a (roughly) £200 model. In addition to the basic exposure settings and manual overrides, this camera offers some nifty extras.
You can activate continuous autofocus, as well as an area autofocus function so precise that it lets you select from 143 regions -- overkill perhaps, but potentially useful. The multimetering function allows you to manually select up to eight different areas to get an average reading. A wealth of white-balance settings are available, including a one-touch manual preset and white-balance compensation, for fine-tuning beyond a given setting. You can also shoot while using a live histogram for reference, with the option of having the very light and very dark areas demarcated directly on the picture.
The f/2.8-to-f/8.0 (f/4.8 to f/8.0 at full telephoto) 5x zoom gives you a focal-length range equivalent to 38mm to 190mm in 35mm-film-camera terms. That provides a good telephoto range but little in the way of a wide angle.
The features are nice extras, but note that if you're a more advanced shooter looking specifically for advanced features, you might be aggravated by some of the limitations imposed. For example, the continuous-shooting mode is disabled when you're shooting at the SHQ (highest-resolution, lowest-compression JPEG) setting. The automatic ISO setting, generally sufficient when you're shooting in good light in the programmed or autoexposure modes, isn't available in the manual and aperture- or shutter-priority modes. So if the light fades and you happen to switch to aperture priority, the camera will automatically fix itself at ISO 80, and you'll need to make adjustments through the LCD menu. This camera doesn't save photos in TIFF or raw formats, either. These are quibbles, for the most part, but potentially annoying ones depending on your shooting scenario.
The high-resolution movie setting delivers 30fps at 320x240 with sound, as well as an option that helps to smooth out some camera shake.
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