Olympus Camedia C-2040z

The popular Camedia C-2020z has had a makeover and the C-2040z is an evolutionary if not revolutionary improvement. Visually, apart from the switch from brushed silver to brushed gold, the new model looks pretty much the same as its predecessor, but under the hood there are some subtle improvements.

It still sports the same image resolution of 2.1megapixels, which produces 1600 x 1200 pixel images. It's still a rangefinder camera (as opposed to an SLR) and this is backed with a 1.8in TFT LCD display at the rear for composing and viewing shots. The C-2040z still has an integral flash and is as light and compact as before.

The 'z' in the model number stands for zoom and this remains equivalent to a 40-120mm 35mm lens. However, the lens is now a bit faster, with a maximum aperture of f/1.8-2.6, rather than f/2.0-2.5. A digital zoom of 2.5x is also available.

Improvements have been made in metering and auto-focusing, where there are more 'average' and 'spot' choices. The camera is capable of auto bracketing +/- 2 steps in 1/3 EV increments. As before, Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Full Manual exposure modes are available.

Like its predecessor this model can shoot QuickTime movies, although these are, as you'd expect, rather limited: they're shot at 15fps, are up to 320 x 240 pixels in size and limited to a maximum length of 60 seconds.

The camera takes SmartMedia Flash memory cards and, with a 64Mb card inserted and images at maximum resolution occupying about 425Kb, there's room for about 150 pictures. Transferring them to your PC used to be a problem with the C-2020z, which had a serial interface, but the C-2040z has a USB interface and so cuts transfer times from tens of minutes to tens of seconds.

Contact: Olympus
0800 072 0070
www.olympus-europa.com.