Olympus C 21

Sorry for my first review which was written the same day I received it. After using for a week, I found I underated the camera so I write this review again. The outdoor image quality is needless to say, very good. The indoor iamge quality is excellent. I don't know what's wrong with my first use which give me dark image. But it was still much better than those taken by my friend's Kodak DC which also has 1600*1200 resolution in addition to 3x optical zoom. I have taken many photos in my room at night with 100W bulb, and I should say they are great! If you don't use white/black compensation, they look a little bit brighter than what you see. If you use +0.7, they are more brighter and very clear as if your room is professionally lighted. I bought it from overstock.com at $299 - $20+ free priority shipping, and I am very satisfied. I found the battery life is pretty decent. You can take 40+ pictures(1600*1200)with LCD on and review them twice with a pair of Maxwell NiMH rechargables. The camera will tell you the battery is low only after taking a few photos. Just don't worry about it, there is no problem with your batteries. I have a 3x zoom ordinary camera and I rarely use the zoom function. That's why I bought a DC without zoom. The camera is small, light-weighted and looks cute. I always put it in my pocket. You should buy a USB card reader(~$30) and rechargable batteries and charger(~$20). There is no need to buy the expensive DC power converter. I highly recommend this product!

Excellent image quality both indoor and outdoor

no optical zoom, no USB

Kodak DC ??? (3* 2.3M)

Outdoor image quality is excellent. But indoor images are dark. It seems that the flash is not powerful enough. I have an ordinary Olympus camera. Its flash is very powerful. Even your room is totally dark, the flash will lighten it up as noon. My friend has a quite good Kodak DC about $500-600 and it also has that problem. Once he took a picture of me, it's totally urgly. So I don't know whether this problem is normal to DC or just for some brands. However I have a LARGAN 640*400 DC which is the cheapest DC, and it doesn't need flash at all, as long as their is a 100W bulb in the room. If you ask me if I recommend it, I really don't know. You get what you pay. But I know if you buy a $1000 one, you won't regret.

Excellent outdoor image quality

indoor image is dark

None

One big weakness of this camera is battery longevity. It's a good thing to have at least 2 sets of batteries available, and a rapid charger. Today rechargeable AA's are not that expensive so that's no big problem though! Irritating things about this camera are the lens hatchet, which in my pocket easily opens up and let dust get into the lens which is not so good! Image quality is good, sharp and low noise in ISO100, in ISO200 and 400 noise is apparent. It's also worth to mention that ISO can be manually set between ISO200 or 400 but not ISO100. I think this is a shame for low-light situations. Buttons, there are too few of them! Too many options must be made on the LCD-display, which takes a lot of battery power and of course time. It would have been appreciated with at least a flash mode button. It's a perfect camera for low-light condition with it's bright F2.4 lens, as long as it doesn't switch to ISO over 100. Sometimes images become too dark in strong sun light and cloudy conditions. This can most of the times be fixed with the gamma setting in a graphics program. Images from the C-21 can be very much manipulated without loosing quality. There are 3 image modes, or actually 4. Basically there are SHQ(Super High Quality - 1600x1200, low compression or tiff), HQ(High Quality - 1600x1200, normal compression) and SQ(Standard Quality). The SQ mode includes both 1024x768 and 640x480. This option is made in the on-screen menu but is restored to 640x480(default) whenever batteries are changed. This is irritating, especially when I was on vacation and I wanted to use the SQ mode with 1024x768 to be able to shot as many pics as possible on my 8+16MB memory cards. It was a pain restoring that setting to 1024 all the time! Another poor thing is the AF system, which is very sensitive to low-light situations, IR assistance would have been appreciated. This is especially obvious at parties etc. where light isn't very good. Overall I find this to be a nice, compact and well priced camera for most purposes except night shots.

Small, light and well designed, sharp pictures, bright F2.4 lens

Lens hatchet construction, too few buttons, too small buttons, battery longevity, no zoom, bad AF in low-light, no ISO100 lock

Samsung Digimax 800k