Olympus Camedia C-470 Zoom review

14 February 2005 6:52 GMT / By Doug Harman

The C-470 provides a basic level of specification in a delightfully curvy body and provides a 4-megapixel sensor and 3x optical zoom lens with a 35-105mm focal range. A 1

The Olympus C-470 Zoom is a digital compact that offers a good specification for a great pic. The 1.8in colour screen uses special ‘Sunshine' technology that reflects more light back out the brighter it gets making the LCD easy to use in bright conditions because it simply gets brighter too

Movie recording with sound and 320x240-pixel resolution joins no less than eight scene modes that include a portrait, landscape, indoor and cuisine mode. PictBridge direct printing with compatible printers means easy printing without a PC while storage is of the xD Picture Card variety: a 16MB card is supplied.

Handling is simple but a predominantly menu driven control system is very slow and the lack of an optical viewfinder requires all composition to go through the colour screen. It's a space saving element to the design and undoubtedly it helps hold down the price but it also means you rely on the camera's rechargeable battery pack, which is, thankfully a good one.

Olympus' proprietary TruePic TURBO processing makes light work of image processing but auto-only sensitivity means the user can never control it in low light, so image noise can become a problem for shots indoors or low light as the ISO gets bumped up. The camera uses harsh JPEG processing even in the highest, Super High Quality mode, so detail can be smoothed away but colour capture is very good.

Verdict

This is a nice, compact machine and one that brings 4-megapixels to the masses at a superb price. But the smoothing of detail by over processing means the larger prints made possible by the high resolution are not what they could have been, so the C-470 is good rather than great.

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Review Recap

Made by: Olympus
Price as reviewed: £220
The good: A simple to use digital compact with attractive, curvy design
The bad: Over processing removes fine detail and lacks an optical viewfinder
Quick verdict: Good but not great
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