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Olympus C-3000 Zoom

Olympus develops a slightly slower, but lot cheaper version of the C-3030 Zoom. (Looks like a great bargain!)

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Page 11:Image Storage & Interface

Review First Posted: 5/30/2000

Image Storage and Interface
The C-3000 uses SmartMedia memory cards and comes packaged with a 16 megabyte card. You can upgrade to sizes as large as 64 megabytes. (From third parties, anyway: As of this writing in May, 2000, the largest card sold by Olympus themselves was a 32 meg unit. SmartMedia cards as large as 128 megabytes are planned by the end of 2000.) We like the C-3000's file naming protocol, which optionally numbers each image shot with the camera progressively, also including the month and day at the beginning of the file name. (This last is really handy for those of us who are organizationally-challenged: You can immediately tell when your photos were taken, even if you never took time to organize them by date or event.)
Entire SmartMedia cards can be write protected by placing a write protection sticker over a specific spot on the card. Stickers can only be used once and must be clean to be effective. (We're not wildly enthusiastic about the write-protect capabilities of SmartMedia cards.) Additionally, the C-3000 allows you to write protect individual images by pressing the MF/OK button on the back panel while in Playback mode. It's important to note that write-protecting individual images does not prevent them from being deleted when the card is reformatted, though.
The C-3000 comes with interface software and cables for both Mac and Windows computers, namely, a cable for the super-speedy USB interface, as well as a standard serial cable.
Following are the approximate resolution/quality and compression ratios for an 8MB card (compression numbers based on our own computations):

Resolution/Quality vs Image Capacity
2048 x 1536
1600 x 1200
1280 x 960
1024 x 768
640 x 480
Images
Approx.
Compression
Images
Approx.
Compression
Images
Approx.
Compression
Images
Approx.
Compression
Images
Approx.
Compression
Uncompressed Quality
0
0:0
1
1:1
2
1:1
3
1:1
8
1:1
SHQ
3
4:1
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Fine Quality
10
12:1
5
4:1
8
4:1
13
4:1
32
4:1
Normal Quality
N/A
N/A
16
12:1
24
11:1
38
11:1
82
9:1


And here's a more comprehensive list, showing capacities of different-sized cards. (Extracted from the C-3000 Zoom's manual.

Number of Still Pictures that can be Taken (without sound)
Recording Mode Number of
Pixels 		File Memory Capacity
2MB
 4MB 8MB 16MB 32MB 64MB
TIFF 2048 X 1536 TIFF 0 0 0 1 3 6
1600 X 1200 0 0 1 2 5 11
1280 x 960 0 1 2 4 8 17
1024 x 768 0 1 3 6 13 27
640 x 480 2 4 8 17 34 68
SHQ 2048 X 1536 JPEG 0 1 3 6 13 27
HQ 2048 X 1536 2 4 10 20 40 81
SQ1 HIGH (quality) 1600 X 1200 1 2 5 11 22 45
NORMAL 3 7 16 31 64 128
HIGH (quality) 1280 X 960 2 4 8 17 34 70
NORMAL 5 12 24 49 99 199
SQ2 HIGH (quality) 1024 X 768 3 6 13 26 53 107
NORMAL 9 18 37 76 153 306
HIGH (quality) 640 X 480 7 16 32 66 132 266
NORMAL 20 40 82 165 331 665

Reader Comments! --> Visit our discussion forum for the Olympus C-3000 Zoom!



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