Battery life (Longer bars indicate better performance)
 |
Number of shots |
Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom (1,500mAh LiIon)
934
Olympus C-7000 Zoom (1,230mAh LiIon)
820
Sony Cyber Shot DSC-V3 (4.4Wh LiIon)
740
Pentax Optio 750Z (1,800mAh LiIon)
660
Canon PowerShot G6 (1,390mAh LiIon)
572
Canon PowerShot S70 (720mAh LiIon)
262
The Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom produces very good images overall, with a few caveats. The default metering scheme tends to underexpose a bit indoors, and the compressed dynamic range results in a relatively low-contrast image. In other words, colours look desaturated and don't pop. The manual white balance, however, generates a fairly neutral, accurate photo. We saw some yellowish casts to flesh tones, though, and purple fringing was fairly obvious with backlit subjects.
Photos looked softer than we expected from a high-resolution camera.
Though photos shot with the Olympus at settings of ISO 80 and 100 had very little noise, we saw evidence of postprocessing artifacts, especially yellow false-colour spots. When printing the photos at 8x10 or smaller, they weren't much of a problem; when blown up to 11x14, the artifacts became annoying. Noise was a problem at ISO 400 and ISO 800, but the camera's noise-reduction feature kicks in at exposures longer than 0.5 second and helped reduce the number of multicoloured speckles in the image. We found a little barrel distortion at the wide-angle setting, but it was most apparent only with subjects that had vertical lines at the edges of the image.
Edited by: Lori Grunin
Additional edditing by: Tom Espiner
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters