Olympus Reviews

PROS:

Overall, I love my 620L. The images it generates are excellent and you have the choice of three different quality settings. Spare NiMH batteries are a must, but that is true with any digital camera, especially one with a flash. We have had prints made from pictures taken with this camera and they were great.

CONS:

Difficult to take night shots or low light shots. The camera is equivalent to a 100 ASA film so if you are planning on taking low light shots, this isn't the camera for you.

I bought my Olympus D-620L four years ago, in November of 1999, just about the time that digital cameras were beginning to attract the interest of novice camera users. My camera has been a workhorse since then, helping me capture excellent photos for use on Ebay as well as in some brochures I've produced for small businesses. My friends have newer and fancier models, but my photos turn out as well as theirs do, and seem far easier to shoot. Unfortunately, last week my beloved old D-620L developed a problem when using the built-in flash. The flash doesn't flash until a second or so after the photo has been taken, so unless I use the camera outdoors or with good indoor lighting, the photos are too dark to use. I returned the camera to Olympus for repair, knowing that an out-of-warranty fix was probably going to be pricey. Well, I just got the estimate to fix it: $262.00. I'm guessing that's a standard fee that Olympus charges for any repair because before I mailed in the camera, someone I spoke to in the Olympus customer service department said that I'd probably be looking at "$262.00 to fix any problem." Still, I sent the camera to Olympus, hoping that the repair would be less than the estimate. It wasn't, so I'm having the camera returned without having the repair done. It doesn't make sense to put that kind of money into a camera that's 4 years old, even though I don't want to buy a new camera at this point. So, my old D-620L will be used for outdoor shots only until I make the move to buy another digital camera. I don't need a 3, 4, or 5 megapixel camera, movie capabilities, or many of the other bells and whistles that are standard on most digital cameras today. But I do want a camera that looks and feels like a camera, not a toy, and one that has a decent viewfinder and zoom. Until that perfect camera jumps up and grabs me, I'll be making do with my Olympus D-620L. By the way, the only reason I rated this camera with 4 stars instead of 5 is because of the steep cost of repairs after the camera is out of warranty. To be fair, however, the sky-high repairs on an out-of-warranty camera are probably a universal problem. Canon has a similar policy; my fairly new, barely out-of-date Canon Z155 died on me not long ago, and the repair estimate on that thing was MORE than the cost of the camera when purchased new. I ditched the camera.

This camera is one of the best digital cameras for Magazine quality work. It is an SLR camera (you look through the lens). It has aperature and shutter-speed settings and USB and Serial attachments. You have three different quality (Standard, High, Super High) settings as well as date stamp possiblities. Great to focus and zoom! Looks professional too.

I purchased this camera for my wife because of it's ease of use (point'n'click) and the lense is automatically covered when turned off (protects lense in her purse or briefcase). It is a nice camera, easy to use, picture quality is OK (my daughter's Kodak 6340 and my Nikon 5700 pictures are much sharper), good camera for beginners. Batteries do not last long, pictures blurred with full digital zoom.

This camera is an excellent value! It is very cheap for a four megapixel camera, has zoom, takes great, sharp, and colorful pictures! I bought this camera for my girlfriend based on what I had read about ease of use for this camera. You would be hard pressed to find a more user friendly camera in this price range or above. THe auto focus on this camera is excellent! We have taken lots of picures with this camera during the day and night and little have come out anything but clear and colorful. Two of the night photos I took of fireworks came out blurry but this is to be expected when not using a tripod. This is a great camera that has a very powerful flash and is easy to use. A word of warning would be not to even try using Alkaline batteries, they will be spent in about 20 shots. One warning, for outdoor wildlife enthusiasts, the zoom motor on this camera is very loud! Instead get one of the Lithium CR-V3 batteries which give excellent picture taking volume in this camera. I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for an easy to use, great working and low priced camera.

It is an excellent camera for this price (I bought it for $250 about 2 weeks ago). Last week I used it to take pictures in Niagara Falls during day and night. The pictures during the day are crisp. During the night, I held it by hand to take pictures of rapids and the water falls (without flash). The water flow effect was surpringly clear and bright.

Its TruePic Turbo image processor is indeed very fast. I used the camera to take pictures of fireworks. During 10 minutes I took tens of pictures.

However, it is quite necessary to have four recargable Ni-Mh AA batteries with this camera. It uses battery power pretty fast.

I've been a professional photographer for more than 30 years (4x5, 220, 35mm, etc.) and a maxim is: NEVER use an unknown piece of equipment for an unrepeatable event! My old 35mm died on the day I had to fly out for a funeral. I bought the D-565 and 128Mb card at a supermarket on my way to the airport. READ THE MANUAL, loaded fresh batteries, shot test pix at airport - SMILED!! Bottom line: Great focus, color saturation, flash/fill, ease of use, subject satisfaction! 6 to 8 shots on alkaline batteries - ordered AC Adapter from Amazon.com - carry pocket full of AA's when prowling for shots. Love it! Pix are incredible on my Big-Screen TV!!
Gripes: Sucks AA's dry far too quickly. REALLY needs NiMH's or recommended AC adapter for downloads, etc.
Get a D-565 while you can and get out there!

I just bought this camera last week and have no regrets! This camera takes great pictures in all types of lighting. The flash is nice and powerful. If you are taking pictures with white or reflective background you might want to turn off the flash. You'd be amazed at how bright the picture looks without flash.

When reviewing the pictures on the LCD, they look so crisp.

The supplied AA's ran out pretty quickly but the fresh batteries I just put in seem to be lasting quite long. I picked up some rechargeable batteries too. The nice thing about a camera that uses AA is...you can get them anywhere! My old Cannon used the CR5 battery but those were about $10-13 each! My friends who have cameras with proprietary batteries are stuck with buying more rechargeable batteries from the manufacturer. Not ideal for long trips or hikes where you dont have access to outlets.

I picked up a 256mb xD card. At the highest quality I could store around 85 pictures.

Great camera!!

I have this Olympus D565 for about a month. I love this camera. It is easy to use, small, fits anywhere. I bought this camera for $299.99 at OfficeMax AND it came with a Espon 5400 all in one printer!
I do recommend getting a higher XD-Picture Card for this camera, It comes with a 16MB card, you only take 5 pictures at high res. I got a 128MB card with that you can take 44 high res pictures.
This camera can take AA batteries which you can get anywhere.It has a strong flash for this size camera.
The pictures came out great, easy to download to your computer.
Great software with this camera. You cant beat this price for a 4MP camera.
You can download the manual and see if it fits your needs. This is a great 4MP camera!!!!

I purchased this camera almost 4 years ago and love it. It sold me on the olympus name. My next camera, if i have to get one, will be another olympus.

Like the fact that it uses aa batteries b/c if i get in a predicament where i need batteries, i know i can go to the neighborhood store to get them instead of being limited to propriatary (sp?) battery units like the sony. I have 2 sets of rechargeable batteries that i use and also have the separate card reader to download at faster speeds.

This camera has taken thousands of excellent pictures for me. I'll probably buy a newer model in the next couple of years but, for now, this 2 megapixel beauty is everything i need.

Good luck.

After months of searching for an easy to use point and shoot 2.1-mega pixel camera. I finally took the plunge and purchased a 490z. I had the opportunity to test the following camera's (thanks to friends and family) Sony S50, Fuji FP2400, Canon S100 and the Olympus 490z. My two main objectives were, picture quality and the ability to turn it on and shoot without messing with any settings. The Olympus wins hands down out of the four. This camera is almost perfect!

Pros: amazing clarity and picture color both indoors and out, excellent flash range indoors, quick cycle and shutter lag times, easy to carry, great battery life with NiMH rechargeables (I use the view finder 90% of the time) Cons: no usb, you have to open the flash

Forget about what you've read about the sliding door to cover the lens, its no problem what so ever. The menus are a little cryptic but 10 minutes with the manual and it's "set it and forget it". No mic for the movies. Hello, I bought it for photo's, not movies.

I purchased the camera, Olympus 64mb card, Olympus USB Camedia Reader and a rechargeable AA battery kit for a little over $600. I can't say enough about how pleased I am with this camera. Anybody can take this camera out of the box and take excellent pictures with very little effort.

I almost took a point off because this camera doesn't have a USB port, but I found a SanDisk USB card reader locally for $40. Amazon didn't sell this reader at the time I write this. The card reader is a necessity, a full 16MB card will take about 20 seconds to transfer with the reader, using the serial port you can go have lunch or something while it downloads. NiMH batteries are also a necessity, for the price of a few lithium batteries you can get 8 NiMH batteries and a charger, that way you can always have a set charged up.

Image quality is excellent. I was looking at the C3030 and couldn't see spending that much for a few extra features and another million pixels. Unless you plan on printing out 8x10 prints the extra resolution isn't needed, use the extra money on accessories. Printing the D490 HQ images at 3x5 inches they look as good as 35mm prints. I have run several tests shooting the same image using all the modes of the camera and found the best mode to use is normal HQ, under certain conditions SHQ will give you better color reproduction and slightly sharper edges. The SHQ-TIFF mode images are huge and I have yet to see any difference between it and SHQ mode, even in macro mode with a complex object the images look the same. As for the soft setting and the digital zoom, you are better off taking a normal HQ image and using software on the computer to soften or resize.

The QuickTime movie feature is fun to play with, kinda like having an old 8mm movie camera. I like the fact that you have to raise the flash manually, if you don't want to use the flash you know it's off when it's down. That's better than having to find a button and look at a display to tell if you've turned it off.

The size, price, and image quality make this a great camera to have.

I'm very pleased with my purchase of the Olympus D460Z digital camera.

Pro: 1) Small footprint, pocket size, same as a regular 35mm point-n-shoot camera. 2) Easy to use, all the buttons and manual settings are very clear. The overall layout is great. 3) Picture quality is very good. 4) 3X optical zoom is fairly powerful. 5) Many useful features, such as panorama, date imprinting, manual ISO, varies of flash modes... 6) Comes with 3 instruction booklets of 3 different languages so you don't need to carry a thick manual for the part that you can't read. 7) Good overall value, quality and features.

Con: 1) Hard to tell if a photo has been taken/captured because there's no clicking sound or other indications. There are warning beeps and orange/green warning lights, but they come on for many different reasons. 2) the flash light does not automatically pop open when turn on the camera, so if there is not enough light, it's really hard to tell if the picture has been taken. So the flash light has to be manually pop open in order for it to be automatic. Manytimes I have to read the picture count or "write" indication to be sure that a picture is indeed captured. 3) The softwere that comes with the package has limited features. 4) No AC adaptor comes with the package (I know, asking for SmartMedia or UBS adaptor is really too much).

Note: If you have software for other serial devices installed, make sure you exit them (modem and serial mouse have NO problem). For example, I have PalmPilot's HotSync software installed, and it conflicts with this photo software (The warning messages do not help at all as in all cases). I called Olympus technical support, and get the answer without much waiting.

Had mine for 3 years now and still works excellent.I ve used it in the woods a lot,broke the front sliding cover off,but still works good without it.Takes excellent photos .A lot of fine tuners on this puppy.

This is my second digital camera, replacing a Casio QV-700. The picture quality seems excellent and I was amazed at how vivid the colors turn out with this camera. I have taken about a hundred pictures with the camera so far and all but a few turned out excellent, and the ones that didn't were my fault. One big advantage this camera has over my Casio is that the LCD monitor has it's own power switch, so you can leave it off while taking pictures and it saves on battery power. There are several settings such as ISO, white balance, etc that can be manually adjusted for better picture quality or left on automatic if you rather not mess with them (like myself). The on-screen menus are pretty user friendly after you read the manual. With the included 8MB Smartmedia card, you can record from 2-122 photos, depending on which of the 5 quality settings you choose. In the 1280x960 resolution mode, you can take 36 pics in High Quality mode (default), 18 in Super High Quality, or 2 pics in Super High Quality-TIFF (uncompressed). In the 640x480 resolution mode, you can take 32 pics in High Quality mode or 122 in Normal mode. Picking up a 16, 32, or 64 MB card will greatly increase your capacity. I plan on getting a 32 MB card myself, which will reportedly hold 146 pics in 1280x960 High Quality mode (or up to 489 pics in 640x480 normal mode). The 3x zoom was better than expected. There are a few things about the camera that I don't care for, such as the main power switch. Instead of having an actual switch, you have to open the lens barrier, which isn't a problem, however when you go to turn the camera off, you have to close the lens barrier part way, then wait for the lens to retract, then close the cover completely. Also, you must manually flip up the flash. Although there are a few minor things I wish were different, don't pass up this camera!

You can extend the life of the batteries by avoiding the ever present temptation to review every picture you take through the LCD screen. Also, leave the screen off when you take pictures and use the traditional view finder, the batteries seem to last as long as a regular 35MM. A side note, I remember paying $799.99 at a well know merchandise center in April '99. Great price here. Additionally, I believe the Flashpath Smart Media Adapter is a must! Loading full images through the camera cables is like connecting at 14,400 baud vs. ISDN T-3!

I purchased this camera being I'm going to be a new grand-father this year and figured what a great advantage it would be to view my pictures on a TV right after taking them. One cable from the camera to the TV and your viewing your photo's on the big screen. This camera was easy to learn to use. The pictures are of professional quality. To pull up your pictures on your PC could not be easier. Just put the film or smart card as it is called into the floppy disc adapter which comes with this model and your ready to go. The soft wear that comes with the camera is also easy to use. For a printer I use a HP 2000C. With this camera and the printer I am able to produce photo quality pictures. I would strongly recommend the D-400 Zoom to any one who is in the market for a digital camera.

The Olympus D-400 is an excellent Digi-cam for the money. But beware of the Bloodhound Virus which came with the included FlashPath Floppy Adapter. Luckily, Norton's Anti-Virus took care of it. All in all, the package is a good deal,but just run a scan on the FlashPath before you load anything with it.

Fits like a glove; nice and compact and even has a holder for extra batteries.