Olympus C-3040Z Review

April 2001 | By Phil Askey

Review based on a full production C-3040Z

Olympus surprised us all when they announced the C-3040Z back in November last year, the camera, almost identical to it's sibling the C-3030Z is distinguished mainly by the super fast F1.8 - F2.6 zoom lens, spot AF and one-touch white balance otherwise features are almost the same:

	C-3040 Zoom	C-3030 Zoom

Lens	3 x zoom Olympus 35 mm - 105 mm F1.8 - F2.6 Ten pieces in seven groups	3 x zoom Olympus 32 mm - 96 mm F2.8 (fixed across zoom range) Eight pieces in six groups
Focus	TTL ESP AF (0.2m - Infinity) Spot AF Manual (0.2m - Infinity)	TTL ESP AF (0.2m - Infinity) Manual (0.2m - Infinity)
Digital Zoom	1 x - 2.5 x (up to 5 x in VGA mode)	1 x - 2.5 x
White Balance	Full Auto TTL (ESP) Four presets One-touch manual	Full Auto TTL (ESP) Four presets
Metering	TTL ESP Multi area spot Spot	TTL ESP Spot
Aperture Priority	Wide: F1.8 - F10 Tele: F2.6 - F10	Wide/Tele: F2.8 - F11
Shutter Priority	4 - 1/800 sec	1 - 1/800 sec
In-camera	Contrast can be set	-
Movie mode	Can zoom	Can not zoom
Recording medium	SmartMedia 4 MB, 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB	SmartMedia 2MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB, 128 MB

Considering which obviously the majority of this review will be based on my review of the C-3030Z, apart from rerunning all the performance / image quality tests on the new camera and exploring some of the cameras new features.

If you're new to digital photography you may wish to read the Digital Photography Glossary before diving into this review (it may help you understand some of the terms used).

Photographs of the camera were taken with a Canon EOS-D30, images which can be viewed at a larger size have a small magnifying glass icon in the bottom right corner of the image, clicking on the image will display a larger (normally 1024 x 768 or smaller if cropped) image in a new window.

To navigate the review simply use the next / previous page buttons, to jump to a particular section either pick the section from the drop down or select it from the navigation bar at the top.

DPReview calibrate their monitors using Color Vision OptiCal at the (fairly well accepted) PC normal gamma 2.2, this means that on our monitors we can make out the difference between all of the (computer generated) grayscale blocks below. We recommend to make the most of this review you should be able to see the difference (at least) between X,Y and Z and ideally A,B and C.

This review is Copyright 2001 Phil Askey and the review in part or in whole may NOT be reproduced in any electronic or printed medium without prior permission from the author. For information on reproducing any part of this review (or any images) please contact: Phil Askey.