First impressions of the Olympus C-2100 Ultra Zoom
By Marty Schultz (schultz@pop1.science.widener.edu)
The gripes:
The LCD viewfinder takes some getting used to, when trying to follow moving
objects at full zoom you have to use manual focus. You'll lose the
subject when trying to use auto focus. The image stabilizer can be
left on as long as you are following the object with an even motion.
The viewfinder does blank for what seems like 1/2 second while the CCD
is read which also makes it harder to track moving objects.
The way it hangs on the neck strap is not the safest, the lens sticks
straight out from your chest. I had to put some string to tie the
straps down. See
pic here.
Only an 8MB memory card with a $1000 camera??? I would have rather
received a 16MB card instead of the batteries and charger.
How
to avoid C.A. in your shots with bright backgrounds
The on/off/reset switch, it would have been better to have the reset
as a separate button. It's too easy to push the lever up by accident
and then have to reprogram all your settings. The manual says you
have to push the lever up to reset for 3 seconds to reset the camera, the
times I've reset by accident it was much shorter.
The good:
The zoom and stabilizer are awesome. The digital zoom works much
better than I expected. The remote is cool.
At ISO 400 and a 4 second exposure no hot pixels show up! I must
have lucked out and gotten a very good CCD chip.
The camera has plenty of options and manual settings. It also
has a nice feature where you can set which options get reset when the power
gets turned off and which ones are remembered. So far I like to have
it remember the S-Prg mode and the ISO setting. You can also turn
off the auto reset completely, but you can still do it with the reset switch
(see "gripes" above).
Pages with test images:
Day
2 More zoom shots, sunny day this time.
Conclusions after 5 days:
It's not a point and shoot camera* ( That's what my D-490 is for
:-). Even in full automatic mode you'll still need to know stuff
from the instruction manual. It takes a couple of days of reading
the
manual and taking lots of test shots to get to know most of the stuff the
camera is capable of. The neck strap problem still bugs me but others
might like the way it hangs on the strap. Also the occasional accidental
reset is a bit annoying. But the camera does take great pictures
and that's what really counts. The huge range of zoom make composition
so much easier.
* My definition of point and shoot is being able to take it out of the
box the first time and start taking great shots.
