Olympus C-720 UZ

Opinion: Received as Christmas gift December 2002, now looking for an upgrade.

Got beautiful photos, but is tempermental, may have been defective since new.

There is no manual focus, if you are shooting through s window with spots on it, it focuses on the window and you have no choice.

Opinion: Had this camera for about 1 1/2 years and must say that it was probably a poor choice on my part in the end. And my advice to anybody looking at this camera is to AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS.

PROS:
Good outdoor shots in good light
Zoom works well
Possible to get action shots IF you prepare for it.

CONS:
Very slow to focus, sometimes as long as 2 - 3 seconds makes it impossib;e to get that spur of the moment shot.
Poor indoor and low light shots
Lack of printed instruction manual
Loose lens.
String for lens cap is too short
Eats batteries even when using LCD sparingly
Flash seems to switch between being too bright or too dark.
No two pictures ever turn out the same and often it Takes 5 or more shots to get that perfect picture.
Lack of manual focus.
Near Impossible to take photos of distant objects as the camera will not focus. (try taking a pic of the moon or an aircraft)
Camera will occasionally lock up and need to be switched off by taking out the batteries.
Video image is so poor that it is less than useless.

Opinion: I've had this camera for 4 years now, it's been with me on many trips and travels, and has not encountered drastic problems. It's very tough and sturdy, hard to accidentally break.
It has excellent zoom (8x) for its size, and for its time. It's light, and comfortable to hold. Good battery life, if you use common sense and use the LCD viewscreen sparingly.
In my experience, it handles low-light situations wonderfully, coming out with sharp images each time, where other cameras would blur them. (I'm sure that's also due in part to learning to hold the camera steady, but even when I've handed it to people who didn't know how to use it, it had good results.)
Its interface is not overwhelmingly complicated, which is a plus - the buttons on the back are all fairly straightforward.
I particularly like the easy access to the AEL button to capture light from another area then take the picture I want, if the camera disagrees with me on the exposure it needs.
For its time (in this day and age, 4 years is a lot for a digital camera that routinely takes quite a bit of abuse during travel etc) it was an excellent deal. It was my first digital camera, and I'm just about ready to upgrade to something else with more megapixels (the C-720 only has 3 megapixels) and with manual features. I've held back so long only because every time I think I want another camera, it surprises me with a great shot I didn't expect it to be able to take.
This one has been a good friend, as all cameras are when you learn how to use them. I'll still keep my Olympus C720 even after the inevitable upgrade to something new.

Opinion: I purchace this Olympus C-720 UZ camera mostly to our sportclubs web-gallery tool. Powerfull zoom and wide scale settings (compact-type camera) were the most important reasons. I have owned it now more than three years and taken ~10.000 photos. During these years ~2000 photos have been on those web-callery pages and even now there is maybe several hundreds of sportfotos on these pages.

Also I have carryed this camera all around world with me and couple of times workteam has put everybodys fotos to one laptop and afterwars those fotos were delivered to everybody. Seems that 8X zoom is such benefit that daytimefotos taken with C-720 were many cases the best of all; espesially at safaris etc. Otherway "normal" view fotos were so samekind that it was absolutely inpossible to separate wich camera was used. (Canon, Fuji, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, HP…)

Benefits:
- 8X zoom, for me absolutely necessary
- Several teme-programs; sport, person, etc.
- Pre-defined "my-camera" settings
- Full manual exposure controll
- Aperture priority
- Shutter priority
- operating time with 4AA rechargeable batterys
- back-up operating possibility with normal AA-batterys
- Max aperture 1: 2.8 quite OK

Opinion: This was my first "proper" digital camera purchased a couple of years ago and despite having recently had more modern & expensive cameras (FZ20 & FZ30) I still carry this one round with me all the time because it is very easy to use, its tough and reliable (its been all around the world with me and taken a quite a bit of abuse!), it uses AA bateries which are readily available and always gives suprisingly good results under most conditions (fantastic sunsets for some reason), if you can find a good one for around £100-£150 I would certaily recomend it as a everyday camera.

Opinion: I have owned this camera for almoust 3 years now - bough it in september 2002.
It is not an easy camera - you will need time to learn how to use it and you will have a lot of blurred noisy out of focus pictures in the beggining.
Once you learned how to use it the quality is stunning. I have won some contests with pictures taken with this camera and printed in A3 format...Most of the posters here take 10 pictures and then come here and declare it bad. I have taken around 20000 pictures with it, it never failed working (software nor mechanics) and, as I told you, the quality was absolutely stunning...

Opinion: so far so good.

Opinion: so far so good.

Opinion: I have now had this camera for over 6 months and absolutely love it. It has great features not the least of which is the terrific 10x optical zoom. Goodbye to awful pixelated digital zooms.