Olympus C-770 UZ

Opinion: - good photo quality
- fast AF and focus easily at low light (few watts light bulb at 2M away)
- powerful flash light (separate wide falsh and tele flash)
- convenient and useful features (remote control, custom key, my mode setup and shortcut menu)
- little CA or PF (thanks ED lens)
- excellent 640 x 480 30fps MPEG4 movie with small file size (no need to bring another DV)
- useful cut movie function on the camera to save much memory

Opinion: very excellent digital camera, 10xzoom with anti-shake function.
fast start-up and focussing.
with hot shoe
good hand feeling,
light in weight.
best for new hands and semi-prosumers.

Opinion: See the points.
Plus for what it's worth: Good looking: 5.

Opinion: Not very good photographs but good video.

Olympus 770 is a new camera with a unique feature. It captures MPEG4 and has a 38-380mm x10 lens. So you should buy it for that and not for its ccd capabilities. I will need all these features as I am going on Athens 2004 Olympics where x10 is absolutely important.

Photos
C770 has a 1 / 2.5’’ sensor (smaller in diameter 35% than usual 1 / 1.8’’) which means that pixels are dense. This on it own is a disadvantage as the smaller a ccd is the easer to produce bad pictures (noise, sharpness etc). The C770 captures a little bit fuzzy (when looked ate 1:1 on a computer screen) photos which are not really bad they are just worse than other (1/1:8’’) 4mp-5mp cameras like Sony V-1. Photos are a bit "noisy" and with grain (try to find some 1:1 unresized samples on the internet to see what I mean). To be honest they are OK for most people. The noise on images is apparent :-( even in low ISO 100 (not to mention ISO400 where noise is realy bad) so you who seek perfection look elsewhere (EOS 300D). The lens is bright (2.7-3.7) but with max aperture of only f:8 with 1/3 steps (actually most cameras have a max of f:8).

Video
The mpeg video is really good (well not very good for fast moving scenes). It supports full 640x480/30fps with good sound.
=> Mind MPEG4 is NOT available on other than 640x480 resolutions (like 340x280)
=> Mind that when sound is enabled ZOOM does NOT work (if you use an external microphone you can have both sound and zoom). Focus works all times :)
=> It saves .mp4 files (witch are heavier (bigger) than mpeg4 on AVI format. That means that you need a P4 to view them and quicktime. It holds 33.4min of video in a 512mb xd card (240kb/sec something).

Features
The camera is absolutely configurable (custom everything) with features only professionals needs (1/3 ExpComp, bracketing, spot AE, spot AF etc, histogram.. +1000 more), and it is much more configurable than my SLR EOS 500 SLR) . It DOES remember configuration if you switch it off and on again (unless you have set it to RESET every time it is switch on which is the default). It has My Modes (4 of them) which can be programmed to the users need (they are like profiles in mobile phones) a custom button and 3 shortcuts (not bad). Unfortunately it takes time to explore all features and one needs to read the full manual first (although it has Auto mode and scenes which turn it to point and shoot).The only thing I did not like is that when you shoot on P mode you cannot change the given combination of shutter/aperture and keep the same EV (like turn 125/f:8 to 250/f:5.6). I liked that on my canon eos 500.

Mechanically
In Europe C770 is black and is of metal. The lens is ok for me (not loose) and does not change size while zooming (fixed size). The aperture makes a noise when shooting (if you move from dark aria to bright one it changes automatically causing a "tsikkk tsikkk" noise. Battery is OK but you will need a second one definitely (as it is a proprietary 1040mah lion one).

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22/12/05 update -- After using it long I discovered that I need to work with reduced sharpness (-2..-5) in order to get a lot less noise and grain. Soft photos are better for later processing (actually -5 is not reduction of sharpness rather not sharpening by firmware algorithms at all). Try different reduced combinations of contrast and saturation. You will get lot cleared pictures and mostly less noise (the main problem of Olympus).