Olympus Digital Camera Review

If you are looking for your first digital camera, this just might help you find the right one. Olympus is a great place to look first, and maybe last.

Why Olympus? There are a lot of great cameras out there, and maybe some are even better. Certainly that depends on what is important to you in a camera. If you are looking for the biggest bang for your buck, look at Olympus. If you are looking for tons of features, flexibility, ease of use and necessary accessories (like batteries), look at Olympus. Oh yes, you get great pictures too. When we made our purchase we picked the Olympus C700. The latest version is the Olympus SP-550 UZ. There are other Olympus models with many of the same features at a lesser price so look around. The Olympus SP-500 UZ is feature packed and cheaper.

Some time ago my family was looking forward to the purchase of our first digital camera. We had never taken many pictures, and when we did the film never seemed to make it to the developer. We pretty much made a commitment to take a lot of pictures if we did purchase a digital camera. It looked like a realistic plan. At that time, even the cheapest digital camera was expensive. We justified the expense by saying we wouldn't have to pay for pictures to be developed we didn't like.

We started our research. It took us about a year. I am pretty sure we looked at every brand of digital camera on the market. We talked to everyone we knew that owned a digital camera. We even spoke to several professionals and everyone recommended Olympus as a first choice and some mentioned Fuji as a second choice. When we felt we had an appropriate education we made our list of features that were important to us, and a list of things we knew we wanted to stay away from.

As much as I hate to admit it, I wanted a camera that looked like a camera. To me a traditional camera is eye candy compared to most of the digital camera styles. Olympus had that. We also knew we wanted mega pixels a plenty. We really didn't need to be all that concerned with that because after a certain number of mega pixels the human eye can't really tell the difference. We knew we wanted as much zoom as we could get. Olympus had all of that by far. Ours is 10X optical and the new ones are as much as 18X. We wanted easy to use. Olympus isn't the easiest, but it is pretty easy. We wanted a digital camera that could use easily found batteries. Olympus uses their own rechargeable battery pack or regular AA batteries. You can find them anywhere. Most digital cameras have proprietary rechargeable battery packs. That doesn't work so well. You charge the batteries and you are ready to go, but the problem is they tend to loose their charge when the camera is not in use. When you want to use your camera the batteries are weak or dead and you can't simply buy regular batteries so you can capture that all important moment.

Other things to consider before you buy are they type of memory card the camera uses and the LCD display. As a rule of thumb figure one meg of space on the card for each picture you take. The actual size of each picture depends on the quality or resolution, but the one-for-one rule helps make quick decisions. The Olympus allows you the option of using the traditional camera view finder or the LCD display to see what you are taking a picture of. The LCD is fantastic when it is difficult to both hold the camera up to your eye and get the angle for the picture you want. The down side of using the LCD is it really puts a drain on your batteries.

We found the Olympus model we selected was the high end of amateur cameras, or the low end of professional cameras. We intended to take simple snap shots most of the time, but we wanted the ability to take world class pictures too. There is nothing we didn't like about the Olympus, with the possible exception of ease of use.

Buy an Olympus, take lots of pictures and enjoy new things like e-mailing loads of pictures to your friends. Sometimes you can send pictures that prove to be a great way to get even with them.