With a price of almost AU$2,300, the Olympus C-4040 Zoom might appear to be targeted toward the deep-pocketed amateur photographer. In reality, though, the camera is better suited to point-and-shoot photographers who care about getting good photos under the widest variety of conditions and who are likely to avoid using the camera's sophisticated manual settings as much as possible.

Familiar design

Olympus has stuck with the same boxy, mini-SLR design of its 3-megapixel C-3040 Zoom. The C-4040 Zoom isn't as sleek or compact as the C-40 Zoom, but this 447-gram camera feels solid and comfortable in your hand.

While we had no complaints about the C-4040 Zoom's ergonomics, we were a little disappointed with the camera's LCD, which offers acceptable performance but has a few glitches. It refreshed jerkily during motion capture and subject changes, and it exhibited interference when we were shooting very bright scenes.

The camera's streamlined menu system is definitely an improvement over those found on earlier high-end Olympus models, but it still takes a little too much work to change image-quality settings; switch among Manual, Aperture-Priority, and Shutter-Priority modes; and use the self-timer. You can set up a shortcut to a menu item that you frequently access so that you can, for example, press a button and go directly to the resolution menu. However, that's just one shortcut.

While it sometimes takes a little digging to access the camera's more advanced features, the C-4040 Zoom does offer the wide range of features that you'd expect from a model at this price point. It has custom white balance and red/blue white-balance compensation, flash exposure compensation, spot and matrix metering, and automatic exposure bracketing. There's also a two-frame-per-second Burst mode, as well as a Movie mode that allows you to capture (at the highest-quality setting) up to 30 seconds' worth of low-resolution (320x240 pixels) QuickTime video on the included 16M SmartMedia memory card.

Once you shoot your pictures, you'll have no trouble transferring them to your PC or Mac. That's because the C-4040 Zoom connects to your computer via a USB cable and appears on your system as a removable storage device.

Bright ideas

With the exception of the amount of time it takes to write high-resolution uncompressed TIFF files--which is really no surprise--the battery-powered (using either AA or the two included long-lasting, non-rechargeable CR-V3 lithium cells) C-4040 Zoom compares favourably performance-wise to other cameras in its price range, with no noticeable shutter lag. It also offers good, though not exceptional, image quality.

Because it sports a fast--or, as Olympus calls it, Super Bright F1.8 lens--the C-4040 Zoom can take usable pictures under a wide variety of lighting conditions. Its images are never fantastic, but they are sharp, fairly colour-accurate, and free of curvature from lens distortion, with good detail in the shadow areas. You'll see a bit of noise if you scrutinise your shots, but you won't find egregious levels of it, and you'll notice purple fringing only in pictures with strong contrasts or back-lighting.

The camera does have tendency to slightly overexpose images, with blown-out highlights and blooming that causes bright areas to bleed into dark ones. During testing, we found that under-exposing of our photos by one f-stop compensated for this problem. Another gripe: the flash produces harsh light and hot spots.

In the end, though it has shortcomings, the C-4040 Zoom comes across as one of the better 4-megapixel cameras on the market. Whether it's worth over AU$2,000 --though you may find it for less than its recommended retail price, of course--is debatable, particularly if you're not planning to make 8x10-inch prints on a regular basis. If that's the case, you may be better off with Olympus's step-down 3-megapixel model, the C-3040 Zoom.

Olympus Camedia C4040 Zoom
Company: Olympus
Price: AU$2,300
Distributor: R.Gunz Photographic
Phone: (02) 9935 6600

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