Olympus C-2100UZ Review, Phil Askey, December 2000

Review based on a production C-2100UZ

Olympus surprised quite a few people when they first announced the C-2100 Ultra Zoom back on in June this year. Looking like an overgrown C-2020Z (on which it does appear to be based), the C-2100UZ sports a large 10x stabilised optical zoom lens. This is its main selling point, offering people the focal length reach they'd previously only been able to get with Sony's Mavica's or other digicams with (less than perfect) add-on lenses. Other things new to the C-2020Z are an electronic viewfinder (providing a sort of electronic TTL), a pop-up flash, new software features and a focus assist lamp.

The Lens

Many people can forgive the C-2100UZ for only having 2 megapixels in the age of 3 megapixel'ers because of this big lens. Add to this the image stabilisation and speed of the lens (F2.8 - F3.5) and it certainly becomes an interesting proposition. With the lens the C-2100UZ looks like a cross between two of it's older brothers the C-2020Z and C-2500L.

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 Adobe Gamma 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 2000 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.