my 2nd digital camera. 1st was Kodak DC280, that my wife bought me in 1999. For a digital camera the Kodak was decent for a long time. Wanted more than a point-and-shoot, also wanted: video, zoom, and manual features this time around.
I returned the C730 after a week. I used it a lot inside, outside, day, night, played with manual features and video. Was disappointed with image resolution, and software.
Haven't decided on a new one yet. Looking in a slightly higher price range, at Minolta 7hi and DiMAGE S414, Pentax Optio 550, Nikon Coolpix 5000 (and wishing my budget was in the $1000-$2000 US range, where SLR cameras would be in my reach!)
Pros:
~ Great optical zoom lens
~ flash sync capabile
~ USB lets you access the camera/images from PC w/o using Olympus software
~ great depth-of-field shots with the manual focus feature
~ compact, but not so much that you'll loose it, or forget it when you're out-and-about.
Problems:
~ For the money, you can get a higher resolution camera
~ Low light poor image quality
~ No sound with video
~ Hated the software that came with it. Slow loading, huge in size, & not very flexible about where you're saving your images.
~ Had read online that you could record audio memos for photos... turns out that is a feature only on the PC. Once you get the images on the PC, the clunky software application (optionally) lets you record an audio memo associated with each image. Totally lame! Any PC with a $2 microphone will record audio that you can put in the same folder as an image as a "memo", or for that matter, you can record a memo on an image and re-save it as photoshop file, giving you one file that has your image & audio combined. To recap, I felt dupped about the audio memo claims by Olympus.
I returned the C730 after a week. I used it a lot inside, outside, day, night, played with manual features and video. Was disappointed with image resolution, and software.
Haven't decided on a new one yet. Looking in a slightly higher price range, at Minolta 7hi and DiMAGE S414, Pentax Optio 550, Nikon Coolpix 5000 (and wishing my budget was in the $1000-$2000 US range, where SLR cameras would be in my reach!)
Pros:
~ Great optical zoom lens
~ flash sync capabile
~ USB lets you access the camera/images from PC w/o using Olympus software
~ great depth-of-field shots with the manual focus feature
~ compact, but not so much that you'll loose it, or forget it when you're out-and-about.
Problems:
~ For the money, you can get a higher resolution camera
~ Low light poor image quality
~ No sound with video
~ Hated the software that came with it. Slow loading, huge in size, & not very flexible about where you're saving your images.
~ Had read online that you could record audio memos for photos... turns out that is a feature only on the PC. Once you get the images on the PC, the clunky software application (optionally) lets you record an audio memo associated with each image. Totally lame! Any PC with a $2 microphone will record audio that you can put in the same folder as an image as a "memo", or for that matter, you can record a memo on an image and re-save it as photoshop file, giving you one file that has your image & audio combined. To recap, I felt dupped about the audio memo claims by Olympus.