Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom review

Performance
The Olympus Wide Zoom C-7070's performance figures were generally very good, except for surprisingly slow autofocusing under low-contrast conditions, leading to a slovenly 2.8-second shutter lag under the most challenging conditions. Shutter lag was a much more respectable 0.5 second under high-contrast lighting.

Power-up time was a middle-of-the road 3.9 seconds, and thereafter, we were able to snap off pictures every 2 seconds (4 seconds with flash). As expected, choosing the 10MB raw or 20MB TIFF file-format options slowed sequence shooting down to every 12 seconds or 19 seconds, respectively. Initial burst mode figures weren't impressive: four full-resolution shots in 4.8 seconds and only two snaps in a little less than a second at 640x480 resolution. Dropping down one JPEG quality level let us capture 11 frames at 3,072x2,304 resolution in about 9 seconds.

Shooting speed in seconds (Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Raw shot-to-shot time

Typical shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (low contrast)

Shutter lag (typical)

Time to first shot

Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom

N/A

2.0

2.8

0.5

3.9

Canon PowerShot G6

2.0

2.0

0.9

0.8

3.1

Canon PowerShot S70

2.9

2.0

0.9

0.8

3.1

Sony Cyber Shot DSC-V3

8.6

1.5

0.5

0.5

3.7

Olympus C-7000 Zoom

16.3

2.3

2.9

0.5

2.2

Pentax Optio 750Z

N/A

3.9

2.3

1.2

5.6

Continuous-shooting speed (Longer bars indicate better performance)

Minimum frames per second

Maximum frames per second

Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom

1.6

2.1

Olympus C-7000 Zoom

1.5

5.0

Sony Cyber Shot DSC-V3

1.0

2.8

Canon PowerShot S70

1.0

2.0

Pentax Optio 750Z

1.0

1.3

Canon PowerShot G6

0.8

1.7