Olympus C-4040

In keeping up with the success of previous Olympus C-Series cameras, the C-4040 Zoom retains many of the popular features of its predecessors while increasing resolution to 4 million pixels, providing great picture quality due to its super bright f1.8 multi-element aspherical glass 3x zoom lens, offering an advanced noise reduction function and including the new "optimum image enlargement" feature so you can produce quality prints as large as 16 x 20 inches.

Review
Being a relative newcomer to the world of digital photography, I was a bit skeptical as to what the Olympus C-4040 experience would be like. After adding the batteries and the memory card, which took about 5 minutes to figure out, I set off snapping pictures of everything in site. The pictures on the built in monitor looked great. I couldn’t wait to see what they looked like on my computer and on paper.
Next I had to get those cool pictures I just took into my computer. I hooked the USB cable from my computer to the camera. Much to my surprise I needed to do nothing more. An icon showed up on my desktop, I clicked it, and there were my pictures. The first thing that hits me is how clear everything was. I then printed out a picture. Although this took a bit longer then I would have liked due to the slowness of my ink jet printer – everything else was so fast - the results were terrific. The printout was suitable for framing.

You can do a lot more with this camera than just point and shoot. You can set the camera to take 16 very high quality pictures or many more pictures at a lower quality. The pictures still look great at the lower setting, particularly if you are just going to e-mail them to friend or save them on your computer. You can also take short video clips, and even record sound. It has a timer and remote to take self-portraits and it has all of those manual settings that my 35mm film camera has. It also comes with Photoshop software to make adjustments to your pictures on the computer.

Now that I have entered this new world, I don’t think there is any turning back. The instant gratification of taking a picture of your child doing something silly and then being able to see it immediately is worth the price of the camera. Olympus has done a fine job of making the art of digital photography easy to achieve even for a beginner.