Olympus Digital Camera

Olympus Camedia C-60 Zoom

The Olympus Camedia C-60 Zoom is a mixed bag. It produces very good images, but you'll need plenty of patience to get them. This 6.1-megapixel camera has a 7.8- to 23.4-mm (35mm equivalent: 38-144mm) f/2.8-f/4.8 3x optical zoom lens, which extends from the body when you slide the clamshell lens cover open to turn the camera on. While it has a certain style, we weren't especially fond of this design; the action wasn't smooth, and we crashed the C-60 in the field several times by attempting to slide the cover shut before the camera had finished its lengthy (averaging 10 seconds) boot-up process. To recover, we had to remove the batteries and reinsert them. The zoom controls were reasonably respon-sive, though the motor was loud. Users frame shots through an optical viewfinder (as with all the 6MP cameras here) or on a 1.8-inch, 134,000-pixel LCD. The smallest of the LCDs in this roundup, it was far better than that of the Kodak, and though it was brighter than the Casio's, it blurred more easily when moved.

Small, boxy, and well balanced, the C-60 has an uncluttered back (almost all controls are accessed through a four-button panel and one dial). Unfortunately, the camera's menus aren't helpful, and the lack of buttons means that you have to know that to reach some functions, you have to know to push given buttons repeatedly until the right choice ap-pears. If you don't remember, there's no way to find these functions in the menus. Once you get the hang of the menus, the camera does have a reasonable set of options, including six scene modes; aperture-priority, shutter priority, and full manual modes; two metering modes; macro modes (for shooting at ranges down to 4 cm); flash intensity control; and exposure compensation (to +/-2EV). The camera shoots at eight resolutions, from 640-by-480 to 2816-by-2112 pixels, and can capture either JPEGs or TIFFs, storing them on xD media. Shutter speeds range from 1/1000 to 8 seconds.

In the lab, the Olympus Camedia C-60 had mixed results. Booting up was painfully slow, averaging 10 seconds. Of course, you can simply leave the camera on for extended periods, thanks to the lithium ion battery, but there's no avoiding the 4.6-second recycle time between shots—one of the worst scores we've seen recently. If you have the patience, however, consider that the C-60 scored the best of these 6MP cameras on our resolution tests, at 1,350 resolvable lines, with a solid pixel transition score of 2.4% (average of horizontal and vertical). Our simulated daylight still life was sharp, clean, and bright; colors were a bit on the warm side, with slightly blown-out whites. Our flash shot was decently illuminated, though we would have liked to see a slightly more powerful flash.