In the hands of a patient and experienced enthusiast, this camera can take excellent photos.Olympus's 8-megapixel enthusiast camera, the C-8080 Wide Zoom, delivers an incredibly broad feature set and some first-rate photos. But many users will find it difficult to efficiently manage all of its various features, and photographers who wish to shoot RAW files will likely consider it uncomfortably slow.
We don't expect the Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom to win -- or even be nominated for -- any design awards. But at 737 grams, its basic-black plastic body (equipped with an xD-Picture Card and a battery) feels sturdy and comfortable to grip, and most of the buttons, dials, and switches are intelligently placed. You can access oft-needed settings in multiple ways, including button-press/scroll-dial combinations and menu diving. Like the Nikon Coolpix 8700, the C-8080WZ has various controls that fall under your left thumb; but unlike the 8700's, they're relatively easy to differentiate by feel, so you're less likely to accidentally activate them, though the power button is dangerously easy to trigger. We inadvertently turned the camera on several times while trying to put it away in a case.
Unfortunately, the camera's interface groans under the weight of all the features and settings it has to manage. It supports eight groups of custom MyMode settings, each of which has more than 20 configurable options. A nifty control panel will show you all the current settings, but it doesn't let you navigate those for MyMode; you have to remember which is which. This sort of complexity requires the ability to download meaningfully named configurations to the camera from a PC.
Furthermore, you have to dive into menus too often. For instance, you can set the mode dial to MyMode, but you'll still have to delve four levels down into the menu system to select from the eight choices. In addition, when you're using the electronic viewfinder (EVF), it will occasionally show the menu screens, but subsequent submenus appear on only the LCD. As a result, the C-8080WZ has a fairly steep learning curve and a high confusion quotient.
With its fast f/2.4-to-f/3.5, 28mm-to-140mm (35mm equivalent) zoom lens and shutter speeds ranging from 16 seconds to 1/4,000 second, the Olympus C-8080WZ can handle almost any shooting situation. It can take both CompactFlash or xD-Picture media, though we can't see why anyone would opt for the latter, given the technology's current maximum capacity of 512MB.
While this camera has an overwhelming number of settings, it doesn't have a purely automatic mode. You'll find many useful and unique features on the C-8080 Wide Zoom, including the ability to set a metering target point separately from a focus target area, record audio simultaneously with capture, display a live overlay on the preview image to indicate clipped highlight and shadow areas, and save four different custom white-balance settings.
As for bread-and-butter features, the C-8080WZ provides a full set of manual and semimanual exposure modes (programmed automatic with program shift, aperture and shutter priority, and manual) and four basic scene modes. To fine-tune exposures, it offers exposure and flash compensation to plus or minus 2EV; spot, multispot, center-weighted, and Digital ESP metering; and the ability to temporarily save an exposure setting in the Auto Exposure Lock memory.
You can choose light sensitivity from among a whopping 10 values, ranging from ISO 50 to ISO 400. In addition to nine preset and one-touch manual white-balance options, you can adjust and store changes to any existing setting using white-balance compensation. And if you're still not happy, you can play with the sharpness, contrast, hue, and saturation controls.
You can select from more than 20 different combinations of resolution and compression levels: file types include RAW, TIFF, and four JPEG-compressed formats, some of which you can shoot at a 3:2 aspect ratio. The camera also supports simultaneous RAW+JPEG capture. In SuperMacro mode, which locks the lens at its widest angle, the C-8080WZ can focus as close as 30 mm -- nice for those who shoot very small objects.
Standard macro mode can focus from 21 cm. You can also record 15fps VGA-resolution QuickTime movies with audio up to the capacity of the media.
The hotshoe accepts many commercial external flash units, but if you want to use all of features on this camera, you should go with an Olympus FL-series flash. The C-8080WZ's built-in flash can reach as far as 5.3 metres.
The Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom has enough performance inconsistencies that it disappoints overall. The fastest the camera can go from shut to shot is about 2 seconds, which is very good, but that's only if the camera remembers to start up with the zoom at its widest angle (you must preconfigure the camera to do so). If it powers up and zooms the lens out to its maximum, it takes 5 seconds, which is pretty mediocre. Under bright conditions, the shutter delay is a reasonable 0.6 second; in dim light using the focus-assist lamp, the delay increases to a not-so-great 1.6 seconds. At the best-quality compressed setting, typical shot-to-shot time runs about 2 seconds, and using the flash ups that to almost 3 seconds, both of which are passable but not great.
However, our biggest gripe is with the C-8080WZ's RAW shooting performance. The camera processes the files serially, and you can't shoot while the camera works on them. After firing off a RAW image in single-shot mode, you must wait an intolerable 15 seconds before you can shoot again. Thankfully, you can opt not to save the image. If you switch into continuous-shooting mode, you can capture 5 frames at about 1.7 frames per second, but you can't refocus for each frame or try to fool the camera by taking single shots in continuous mode. Furthermore, that 5-frame buffer will requires 15 seconds per shot to save, which means you have to wait 1 minute, 15 seconds before you can fire off another shot. At 21 seconds from shot to shot, TIFF isn't an option. The bottom line: Unless you're in a studio photographing fruit, the C-8080WZ is a miserable choice for shooting uncompressed images.
Zooming from wide to telephoto is reasonably quick, though it's stepped rather than continuous (it stops at predetermined locations), which makes composition tricky for perfectionists.
The EVF is decent but suffers from the same flaws as most of its kind: the update delay, though short, is a bit disconcerting, as are the not-quite-right colours and slowness at reflecting changes in exposure. The LCD is bright and crisp, but it's not nearly high-res enough for you to accurately judge if a full-resolution photo is in focus, and it can only tilt up and down. Both the EVF and the LCD show about 100 percent of the frame.
Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom
Company: Olympus
Price: AU$1,699
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 659 678
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who does your reviews ?
after testing this camera and finding more reviews of the camera it leaves me thinking that you really have no idea what you are t
talking about