Olympus Camedia C-60 Zoom review

With its sensible mix of features and capabilities, the 6-megapixel Olympus Camedia C-60 Zoom is targeted at beginners and still-learning photo buffs who want a good-quality, relatively compact digital camera. It builds on the strengths of the C-50 Zoom by ratcheting up the camera's resolution, battery capacity (1,230mAh rather than 1,100mAh), LCD screen size (46mm versus 38mm) and connection speed (USB 2.0 as opposed to USB 1.1).

Additional features include 13 different shooting modes and a nearly full complement of manual settings, a broad range of shutter speeds (1/1,000 of a second to 8 seconds) and a 3x optical zoom. There are a few pleasant surprises, such as the My Mode settings saver, which is easily accessible from the mode dial. There's also the odd misstep, including a power mechanism that's way too sensitive.

Design
Set in a brushed-silver all-metal case with a sliding lens cover that doubles as an on/off switch, the 198g C-60 Zoom is built to travel. Everything feels solid and well constructed. The large mode dial on the top looks and feels like the equivalent dial on a 35mm camera. Despite the compact size of the camera, the back-mounted buttons and the four-way arrow pad are substantial enough for even large hands to handle. Olympus's long experience in designing digital point-and-shoot cameras shows in many of the small details. For example, with most point-and-shoot cameras, you have to wait for the lens to extend before you can operate the menus, even if all you want to do is view your pictures. With the C-60 Zoom, you can press the play button and receive full -- and almost immediate -- access to the playback menus.

While the C-60 Zoom is superior to other point-and-shoot cameras in many aspects of its design and structural integrity, it has two flaws that can seriously hamper its use. The dual-function lens-cover on/off switch is much too sensitive. We frequently turned off the camera, and occasionally turned it on, by accident. The switching-off problem is aggravated by the camera's design: the open cover protrudes slightly, so holding the camera with just a little extra pressure will turn it off. The other design flaw is the narrow zoom lever, which is pointy enough to be uncomfortable when you shoot for long periods.

Features
The C-60 Zoom has a broad range of controls and capabilities, including five ISO settings and six flash modes (two for low-light flash-assisted shots). There are more shooting modes than you'll find on most higher-priced cameras. These include Landscape+Portrait mode, which is optimised for keeping both the subject and background in focus, and Self Portrait mode, which is set up for arms-length photos you take of yourself. Strangely, with all the available settings, there's no provision for manually setting the white balance, other than selecting one of four preprogrammed settings: Daylight, Clouds, Tungsten or Fluorescent.

The 3x optical zoom lens covers a fairly typical span of 38mm to 114mm (35mm-camera equivalent). The C-60 Zoom doesn't have an AF-assist lamp, which would have made it easier to lock focus in low light. In addition to the standard macro mode, which focuses down to 200mm, there's Super Macro mode, which focuses down to just 40mm.

Performance
The C-60 Zoom is no speed demon, though overall it proved better than average. Turn-on to first shot time clocked in at a decent 3.0 seconds, though shutter lag ran a bit high for this camera's class: 0.6 seconds in scenes with high contrast and 1.2 seconds under dim contrast. And while it eked out an impressive 2.0 seconds for the time between nonflash shots, that time swelled to a mediocre 5.0 seconds for flash-to-flash shots.

Those who savour every detail of their pictures will be pleased to know there's no time penalty with this camera for saving uncompressed photos. Shot-to-shot time is the same (2.0 seconds) whether you're saving uncompressed TIFF files or lowest-compression JPG files. When your subject goes into overdrive, you can use the camera's 1-second burst mode to capture 4 photos in rapid succession. In our tests, it did a little better than that, snapping up four pictures in 3.0 seconds. The proprietary 1,230mAh lithium-ion rechargeable battery lasted for only 275 photos. That's more than you're likely to shoot during a single outing, but fewer than we've seen with other recent snapshot cameras.

We also found the autofocus to be slightly uneven, with a tendency to wander in low light (probably attributable to the lack of an AF-assist lamp). The zoom lever proved responsive without being overly sensitive. By tapping it slightly, we could quickly fine-tune its position.

The C-60 Zoom's LCD screen held up reasonably well in direct sunlight. It's made from a semitransmissive (low-reflective) material designed to cut down on glare and maintain better visibility in bright light. The optical viewfinder has only about 85 to 90 per cent coverage, so we favoured the LCD screen for critical compositions.