Back to Walmart it goes.. (sample pics,compare to Kodak 215)
Written: Jul 12 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Battery miser, good outdoor quality, nice viewfinder
Cons: No zoom, terrible UI, terrible software
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| isewell's Full Review: Olympus Camedia D-360L Digital Camera |
The quality of the photos is good, but not good enough. Sample photos are at the end of this review.
This is my second digital camera. It is the second I bought from Walmart, and the second I will be returning to Walmart. (thanks to the 3 month no-questions-asked return policy!) My first digital camera was a Kodak 215. The reason I will be returning this camera is the same as I returned the Kodak - I am still not happy with the overall quality of the output. It is still far inferior to a scanned in (at 100dpi) 35mm picture.
In this review I will also try to compare the Olympus to the Kodak.
Outdoor quality
The outdoor shots taken by this camera are of much higher quality than the Kodak. So much so, in fact, that I suspect I bought a "dud" kodak camera with lense problems. The Olympus really didn't do very well in low light conditions. Even in full sunshine, some images would appear grainy or fuzzy (even at the highest quality).
Indoor quality
The indoor quality was great, as was the Kodak's. For a camera to take pictures of people, or a party, etc., this is a great camera. However, it's really going to cause quite a bulge in your pocket....
Size
It's big. I could fit about 1.5 of my Canon Elph cameras inside it (the Elph that has the 23-69mm zoom). This is not a "slip in your pocket" camera. What I find amusing is that I recently bought a Canon ZR-10 digital camcorder (which I have also written an epinion about.. it's a wonderful piece of technology!) which is only about 1.5 times as big as this digital camera!!
Zoom
It doesn't have an optical zoom lense. It has one of these dorky "digital zoom"'s, which basically means it will clip the outside areas for you. Of course, the resulting image has poor resolution. I never ever use the digital zoom feature - I much prefer to take the whole picture and zoom it myself at home with PhotoShop. This is one area where the Kodak is definitely better - I really like the optical zoom.
Viewfinder LCD
The viewfinder is excellent. It is quite bright, with a solid piece of plastic over it so you don't feel you can damage it (unlike the Kodak). The viewfinder updates very quickly and smoothly - almost like a camcorder's viewfinder.
Camera's User Interface
This camera's user interface is absolutely terrible. Olympus should take a lesson or two from Kodak to find out how to design a good UI. The menus are full of cryptic icons and text, (with no help offered). Moving around the menu system is very slow and painful. Cycling through pictures to try to find a particular one takes forever as the redraw is so slow. Some features are also just poorly done - I got excited when I saw the "panorama" mode but then it turned out that all it does is place visible edges on your viewfinder screen.
Taking a photo
The camera is very fast (much faster) than the Kodak when recording a photo to the Flash. It really takes only a few seconds. It can even take multiple shots in a row (I forget how many) and then save them to flash. However, if you want to preview the shot you just took to show it to friends, good luck. If you have the viewfinder up when you take the photo, it will freeze the photo for a few seconds - but then it goes back to a live display. To bring up the photo again, you have to close the camera, press a button and wait another 5 seconds for it to bring it up. For those of us who want instant gratification, this just won't do!
Overall, however, the Olympus is much better than the kodak in this respect.
Battery usage
Amazing. This camera is a real miser on batteries - even with the viewfinder on. I'm not sure how Olympus did this. I've only had to recharge it twice and I've taken over 100 photos. Again, the Olympus is much better than the Kodak in this respect.
The software
The windows software to download the images (called CAMEDIA) stinks. No questions about it. It's very slow, and buggy. I once lost a whole roll of film because I copied it then deleted the images from the camera without checking if the copy worked. I went to look, and none of them were there! There aren't many manipulations you can do inside the software, and those you can do, take forever. There is no way to view the contents of a camera inside the windows explorer interface. The Kodak is miles ahead in this category.
The one nice thing is that it saves the pictures with a smart file name system. It uses the date/time you took the shot, instead of the picture #, like the Kodak.
Conclusion
If it was possible to take the best features of both the Kodak and the Olympus you'd have one great digital camera. But the Olympus has far too many flaws for it to be worth $300. Perhaps I'm too picky on my digital cameras, but I'm more than happy to wait till the technology progresses.
You can check out photos taken by this camera at http://www.ianandwendy.com/digicam.html
Just scroll down to get to the Olympus 360 shots. Also check out my home page, http://www.ianandwendy.com for lots more pictures taken with the Olympus. In particular, look at the Our new home/Our New House, and look at the Apr/May slideshow. The earlier slideshows are taken with the Kodak.
I hope you enjoyed this review. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. Please check out my other epinions - I try to keep all my reviews up to date. If you are not a member, please consider joining - epinions is a great site for reviews of all kinds of things.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
isewell
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Member: Ian Sewell
Location: Santa Rosa
Reviews written: 57
Trusted by: 19 members
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