Olympus C-55 Zoom review

Performance
We found the Olympus C-55 Zoom's performance inconsistent, both in our standard testing and in everyday use. At its best, the camera is a solid performer, but we were frequently held up by an indecisive autofocus. At times, we thought we'd prefocused successfully, only to have the camera refocus when we fully depressed the shutter release, significantly delaying the shot. The shortest shutter lag we experienced in our testing was a respectable 0.65 seconds. The AF illuminator lamp performed well, aiding in low-light focusing performance.

Manual focus, however, was difficult at best. It's easy to switch over but a real challenge to determine sharp focus by looking at the magnified 'focus window' on the LCD.

Shot-to-shot time lagged at 4.7 seconds. Our best sequential shooting time was slightly less than 1.6 fps for 4 frames, which is faster than the claims in the user guide.

While we like the 5x zoom lens, we found the zoom lever itself frustratingly inaccurate, and we often suffered too much back and forth in an attempt to frame the shot we wanted.

We have no complaints about the 51mm (2-inch) LCD, which is sharp and bright in most lighting conditions. The optical viewfinder isn't very practical, however -- even when you move your fingers out of the way. It's small and provides an incomplete, though clear, view.

The navigational buttons on the four-way controller are programmable to give you quick access to the menu selections you use most

Image quality
The Olympus C-55 Zoom excels here, producing pleasing, clean photos with accurate exposure and very good detail and sharpness. Colours are saturated but natural and photos exhibited very little noise at low ISO ratings, although at ISO 400, noise does tend to mar the photographs. Surprisingly little purple fringing was visible, even in branches and gate detail photographed against the sky.

The automatic white balance performed nicely both outdoors and in, making it generally unnecessary to take advantage of the C-55's many white-balance settings. Flash-lit photos were exposed properly too. Neither barrel nor pincushion distortion was noticeable in any of our test photos.

Edited by Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by Nick Hide