Olympus D-490

This is a review of what I think is a great little camera.  I have been
frustrated lately in deciding which camera to buy to replace my aged 640 X
480 digital.  I figure there are several of you out there with a similar
dilemma.  I like the Kodak's but they're hard to use.  I find the controls
as confusing as programming my VCR.  (someone please send my wife in so I
can operate this thing).  The Sony's are OK, but a bit pricey when you
compare pixels per dollar.  I liked the color & features of a few Toshiba's
but the lens seemed underpar or fuzzy.  There were many others, but either
they didn't have the features I wanted, or they wanted an arm and a leg.

The fun of getting a new camera is exacerbated by the fact that on the
Internet, it's difficult to make a good decision.  Most stores don't have
flash cards or batteries in them, so it's a lot like looking at a small
plastic box that is very expensive.  They have the boxes conveniently locked
away so you can't even view the them for features.

So I found myself at a local Circuit City where I would usually go for TV's
or stereo's, and I noticed they have working touch-feel cameras there.
Downside is that you have to talk to someone that appears young enough to be
dating your teenage daughter, lets not go there right now.

I had a preset idea of what I wanted:

megapixel level camera
real zoom
capable of extreme close-ups for small products
video capability
fast recovery time after shooting an image
reasonably affordable in $300 - $600 range
controls that don't require rocket scientist to use
panorama ability a nice plus
USB

As you have figured by now,  the cost factor here was very limiting.  What I
wanted belonged more in the $999.99 and up range than it did at half that
price.  Video capability was the big show stopper with very few mid range
priced megapixel cameras having this ability.

I spent a lot of time at cnet.com looking for the ideal camera.  It seemed
they had little nice to say about any camera that was less expensive than my
house.  many of the models I was interested in were not reviewed yet, or
were considered out of vogue because they were last years model.  Confuse
me!

I finally settled on the Olympus D-490 which has all the above features.  I
bought it and brought it home and played with it for a while yesterday.  I
was suitable impressed.  I paid full retail of $499 at Circuit City, but
they let me fondle it, and that was important to me.  How else was I to find
out of I liked it or not?  It's available on the web in the $360 range.
Circuit City gave me a rebate certificate to send in for a free USB flash
card reader.  The camera doesn't have a built-in USB port.  That's a
tradeoff you have to make.  Downloading 8 megs via serial can be a slow
battery obsorbing thing.

I found it easy to use and the manual very helpful.  I was able to take
pictures of a bottle of alcohol that were much easier for me to read
on-screen, than in real life.  The video mode uses the popular .JPG movie
format from Apple's Quicktime.  Images are selectable as .JPG or TIFF.   It
has two pixel settings of 1600 X 1200 (2.1 megapixels) or 640 X 480.  This
is very acceptable for web use.  The small 8 meg smartcard is capable of 16
high quality or 82 medium quality images.

Software was minimal, it mostly downloads the images or movies.  Some
cameras have 500 megs of useless editing software, which I dislike. I
already use PSP for most work and it worked fine here.  Apple sells it's
QuickTime editing software for a measly $29 so that's a reasonable amount to
spend on a fair editing software.

I looked back at CNET to see what they said and their evaluation was pretty
average.  You can view it here.
http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1079-405-2466724.html?tag=st.co.1079-40
4-2466724.rev-rev.1079-405-2466724

They rated it as a 6.  I thought, that's pretty bad, but then they were
always rough on sub $1000 cameras with many fine ones being a 7 or an 8.  6
seems a little poor, but when you look at the features, it doesn't hold
water.  we are talking a camera with a street price of $360 here with video,
a grown up glass lens (not plastic) and some other features only found on
expensive cameras.

The worst thing they said was that the color was muddy and there was no USB.
They did say it was clear and crisp.  So what does muddy mean?  It means the
color contrast is a little off.  I applied a quick photo filter in PSP 7 and
the image looked outstanding.  I can live with that.  I can live with the
USB reader for downloading too.

TechTV had a pretty nice writeup on this camera at
http://www.techtv.com/freshgear/reviews/story/0,23008,3013218,00.html

Chick it out, if your looking for a pretty good camera and money is a
consideration, maybe this is the camera for you.  Objest appear smaller in
mirror and all other standard disclaimers blah blah.

Paul Wilson
webgooru(at)gte.net

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