This high-end Olympus digital camera uses a different design to the C-200. Styled much like a conventional SLR (and it is an SLR camera), it uses the image captured on the 2.1Mpixel CCD directly in an LCD viewfinder. This makes it easy to superimpose icons for the camera's settings in your field of view, but it produces a very dotty image to work with. It's the least pleasant of the five cameras in this respect.

Other controls include a cross of buttons to manipulate the menu system on the LCD monitor screen, and separate buttons for power, macro, flash and 'drive'. The latter enables sequential shooting, like having a motor drive on a conventional camera.

As the name might suggest, one of the most attractive features of this camera is its zoom function. As well as a 2.7x digital zoom, it has a 10x optical zoom lens, giving an impressive 27x zoom overall. You really can pick out a lot of detail when you enlarge a subject this far, even when you're nowhere near it.

The camera takes well-balanced, finely-detailed pictures in both its automatic mode - which many people will use all the time - and manual mode, where you can adjust focus and exposure by hand.

Its 16MB SmartMedia card can be clicked out to read in a card reader, or you can connect the camera to your PC through a USB connection. The control software is the same Camedia Master supplied with the C-200, but you also get CamediaSuite and PhotoGenetics software for image manipulation. This is a competent camera, but the LCD viewfinder is, in our opinion, a design flaw.