May 20, 2007 12:21 PM
6080 Views
I bought this camera from Mustafa Center at Singapore for SIN$419 (US$290). It is one of the slimmest camera that is 7.1 megapixel and with 5X optical zoom. Normally at this width you get 3X zoom and 6MP and such cameras are expensive. This is a great deal from Olympus. After usage of one week continously I found the camera is good for all kinds of light, important to note is it takes good photo even in normal 40w bulb without flash. Just use a tripod and it gives very natural color. It has got a very good feature for nature loving photographers as you can take a closeup of a flower/insects at 3cm like professionals do. It is very slim and very light and I can easily cary it in my shirt pocket like a small cell phone.
The only con it has is its digital image stabilization is not good. When my wife, or my son took pictures, 30% of them gets shaken. However there is a forced image stabilizer which if selected removes shaking but at the expense of picture quality. I am not sure if there are digital cameras with optical image stabilizers. However if this camere is used with tripod one can shoot at night only with moon light and picture comes perfect with long exposure of order of ~5sec. FYI - In camcorder do not go for one having digital image stabilization as in this case the image shaking is cancelled by digital calculation which can never be perfect and it will be slow and not very responsive.
Always go for optical image stabilization (OIS) which is perfect. In big camcorders there are both - first level is done by optical and then any glitches is perfected by digital.
