The Olympus C-750 is the latest upgrade from the C-730 and C740!
Written: Jul 07 '03 (Updated Aug 26 '03)
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Pros: Excellent photos, use it in the auto mode or make all your manual settings!
Cons: The memory card is too small and no rechargeable batteries!
The Bottom Line: If you are looking for a powerful digital camera with great photo quality, then this is a beauty!
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| surferdude7's Full Review: Olympus Camedia C-750 Ultra Zoom Digital Camera |
The Olympus C750 has some improvements over the earlier models. The C-730 and C740 are 3-megapixel digital cameras where the C750 is a 4-megapixel digital camera. One big improvement over the other two is the C-750 has a built-in Hot Shoe and it also has sound for the movies where the C-740 does not. The C-750 can only use the xD-Picture Card where the C-730 accepted both xD-Picture Cards and SmartMedia Memory Cards.
The Design
The C-750 has the same general body shape and size as the rest of the C-series. It has a good feel to it with the controls in easy reach. The camera has a silver and black body that measures 4.2 inches x 2.6 inches x 2.8 inches and weighs about 12 ounces with the batteries installed.
The camera is a 4.0-megapixel CCD that will produce a photo as large as 3,200 x 2,400 pixels with interpolation, or 2,288 x 1,712 pixels uninterpolated. This will produce a printed photo of great clear quality.
The top of the camera has the hot shoe, for an external flash, sitting in the center of the top. Right around and in front of the hot shoe is the built-in popup flash. There is a shutter button and around the shutter button is the zoom lever. There is also the mode dial for your preferred settings.
The bottom of the camera has the battery compartment cover and a tripod socket.
The right side of the camera has the xD-Picture Card compartment. The left side has a speaker for playback, a compartment for the DC-In, A/V Out and USB connector port
The front of the camera has the 10x lens, a microphone, a self-timer LED and IR remote sensor.
The back of the camera has the viewfinder, the LCD, a Four-way Arrow Pad with the OK button in the center and the On/Off button. There are also three buttons on the top part of the back next to the viewfinder for Self-Timer/Remote, Erase, Spot, Macro Flash, Protect and Flash Release
The View!
The Olympus C750 gives you a 1.5-inch TFT color LCD screen and an electronic viewfinder.
The electronic viewfinder (EVF) is like a small LCD screen built-in the viewfinder with the same information that the LCD shows. The electronic viewfinder gives you TTL (Through the Lens) viewing and it has a diopter correction adjustment. My first impression of them was I didn’t like them but now that I have used a couple I am getting use to them. My main gripe is the electronic viewfinder does drain the batteries down faster than the optical viewfinder. The electronic viewfinder has about 114,000 pixels.
The 1.5-inch TFT color LCD screen with about 180,000 pixels has more details and is used for more functions on the camera. The LCD can be used for photo taking, photo reviewing, photo editing and camera setups. The LCD will even let you crop or resize your photos.
The Flash
The C-750 has a built-in pop-up flash with modes of On/Off, Auto, Fill-in Flash, Slow Sync, Slow Sync with Red-Eye Reduction and Red-Eye Reduction.
The pop-up flash is slow and sometimes it pops up too slow for me, I prefer leaving it up when a flash is needed.
The added “Hot Shoe” is a nice feature, I do recommend buying an external flash for this digital camera, it is worth the extra investment.
The Lens
The Olympus C-750 has an all-glass lens with 11 elements in seven groups. It is a 10x zoom lens of 6.3mm to 63mm and is equivalent to a 35mm camera of 38mm to 380mm. This is one impressive zoom lens that brings the subject to you.
The lens has an aperture range from f2.8 to f8 with normal focusing from 23.6 feet to infinity.
The camera also has a 4x digital zoom giving you a total of 40x zoom and focusing can be done in auto focus or manual focus.
Movies
The C-750 is like most of the C series camera and gives you two mode of recording movies, 320 x 240 pixels and 160 x 120 pixels. They are recorded with sound at 15 frames per second.
The Movie Mode lets you capture movies for as long as the memory card has available space. This is an improvement over other Olympus models which had time limits.
Nothing special here, I believe if you want better movies check out the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P72 Digital Camera.
Photos
The C-750 gives you a variety of resolutions and the type of quality you wish for each. The sizes are 2288 x 1712, 2288 x 1520 (3:2), 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768 and 640 x 480 pixels. Interpolating up from the 2288 x 1712 pixels of the CCD can give you a resolution of 3200 x 2400 pixels.
Photos are saved in the TIFF which is uncompressed and the JPEG mode. The JPEG files can be compressed in SQ (Standard Quality), HQ (High Quality) and SHQ (Super High Quality).
Sequence Mode
There are three Sequence modes that lets you take photos at rapid speeds like a built-in motor drive.
A 2 in 1 Mode
The 2 in 1 mode lets you take two photos on a single frame.
Panorama Mode
The C-750 has a Panorama Exposure Mode when you use a Olympus xD-Picture Card. You can take up to 10 photos and then with a computer and their software you can stitch them together to create on large photo.
My Mode
My Mode is the settings you setup like shutter speed, aperture and so on. You can make four different My Mode setups for the camera to remember.
A/S/M Mode
This for setting your priority of Aperture, Shutter or Manual.
Program Mode
Puts the camera in both aperture and shutter speed settings.
Auto Mode
Is the setting if you want the camera to do it all for you. This is your point and shoot settings and the camera takes control.
Other Modes
The C-750 has several other modes like, Portrait Mode, Sports Mode, Landscape / Portrait Mode, Night Scene Mode and Self-Portrait Mode.
Video Out
There is an A/V Out port so you can connect it to a TV and see you movies and photos in a large size. It use a video out signal of NTSC or PAL.
The Power
One disappointment for me was they did not include rechargeable batteries and a charger. The camera can take two CR-V3 lithium battery packs, four AA batteries of alkaline, lithium, NiMH, NiCd or an optional AC adapter. I recommend buying a charger and eight NiMH rechargeable batteries, this way you have a spare charged set all the time.
Other Features
Can be used on PC computers with Windows ME, XP or 2000 and for Mac users
CCD Sensor 4.10 Megapixels
White Balance Settings of Auto, Daylight, Overcast, Tungsten and 3 Fluorescent settings
Shutter speeds from 1/1,000 to 16 seconds
Spot or Digital ESP metering systems and a Multi-Metering option
Auto Bracketing, Sequence, AF Sequence, and Hi Sequence capture modes
ISO equivalents from 100 to 400
Contrast, Saturation and Sharpness image adjustments
What You Get!
The C-750 Ultra Zoom digital camera
One 16 megabyte xD-Picture Card
Two CRV3 battery packs
A USB cable and Video cable
Neck strap and lens cap with strap.
CD-ROM with software
User manuals
Overall
The color of the C-750 is great with good skin tones and life like colors. It produces a rather sharp clear photo with the proper exposure level in the point and shoot settings.
Close-ups are great but there is a little red eye in some of the close-ups even in the Red Eye settings. This is where a good external flash will help in the red eye prevention. Night shots are done best in the ISA 400 setting though if you have enough light the ISO 100 and ISO 200 do a terrific job. Outdoor day shots produced the best of all the photo shots that I took.
The movies are a disappointment for me since the quality haven’t improved and looks the same as on my Olympus Camedia C-3000 Zoom Digital Camera.
The battery life lasts a lot longer than I expected with four NiMH rechargeable batteries and using a Olympus 128 MB xD-Picture Card for larger storage. I was able to snap off about 150 photos before the batteries started to get weak. This was using both the electronic viewfinder and the LCD for photo shooting. I shot various photo sizes so I could check the quality between them.
Using my HP PhotoSmart 1215 Personal Printer, I printed up some nice 4 x 6 inch and 8 x 10 photos, they all turned out great.
For a camera with a list price of $599 it is disappointing to see no rechargeable batteries with charger included and the xD picture card of 16MB is way too small for a 4 megapixels digital camera.
Overall it is a great camera with a superb 10x zoom lens, it looks great, feels good and handles great also.
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Here are some of my other camera reviews!
Fuji FinePix A303 Digital Camera
Fuji FinePix 2800 Digital Camera
Kodak DX4900 Digital Camera
Minolta Dimage E-201 Digital Camera
Minolta Dimage 7Hi Digital Camera
Olympus C-4040 Zoom Digital Camera
Olympus Camedia D-40 Zoom Digital Camera
Olympus Camedia D-380 Digital Camera
Olympus Stylus 300 Digital Camera
Olympus Camedia Stylus 400 Digital Camera
Pentax Optio 430 Digital Camera
Nikon Coolpix 900-s Digital Camera
Nikon Coolpix 3500 Digital Camera
Sony MVC-FD87 Digital Camera
Sony Mavica MVC-FD95 Digital Camera
Sony DSC-F717 Cyber-shot Digital Camera
Sony DSC-P2 Digital Camera
Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P72 Digital Camera
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 579
This Camera is a Good Choice if You Want Something... Flexible Enough for Enthusiasts
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surferdude7
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