Olympus C-3000 ZoomOlympus develops a slightly slower, but lot cheaper version of the C-3030 Zoom. (Looks like a great bargain!)<<Design :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 5:ViewfinderReview First Posted: 5/30/2000 |
ViewfinderThe C-3000 features both a "real image" optical viewfinder and an LCD monitor for image composition. The optical viewfinder has central autofocus crosshairs to help you line up shots and two small external LEDs that report whether or not the focus and/or flash is ready. There's also a small dioptric adjustment dial on the left side of the optical viewfinder, to assist eyeglass wearers, but the eyepoint is a bit lower than we'd like to see for use with glasses. The viewfinder zooms along with the lens, but naturally doesn't respond to the 2.5x digital telephoto, which is dependent on the LCD monitor.
A 1.8 inch, TFT, color LCD monitor provides detailed feedback about the current exposure settings, showing the currently selected f-stop, shutter speed and exposure compensation in a row of numbers across the top. In Aperture and Shutter Priority modes, the aperture or shutter value appears continuously, along with the exposure compensation setting, while the second, automatically determined exposure value (either shutter speed or f-stop) appears whenever the shutter button is half pressed, triggering the autofocus and autoexposure systems. The same goes for Manual mode, except both values are displayed together. When the LCD monitor is turned on in record mode, some of the camera's exposure settings are listed as well, such as flash, exposure, etc.
When using the LCD monitor to review captured images, you can actually zoom in on displayed images up to 3x, as shown in the screen shot at right. This is very handy for checking focus, small details or precise framing. When you're zoomed in, the jog dial buttons let you scroll around within the larger image. There's also the index display option, which displays either four, nine or 16 images at a time.We found the C-3000's optical viewfinder to be a little tight, showing approximately 82 percent frame coverage at wide angle and about 81 percent at telephoto. (Note that we've changed our nomenclature on this to better reflect what you see looking into the viewfinder: We previously would have referred to the C-3000's viewfinder as "loose"...) These numbers are from the 2048 x 1536 resolution size but the smaller 640 x 480 resolution size numbers are similar at 83 percent accuracy for both wide angle and telephoto. We also noticed that the framing here slants just a little to the left vertically, possibly the CCD on our test unit was shifted a little. The LCD monitor proved to be much more accurate, showing about 97 percent frame coverage at wide angle and slightly over 100 percent at the telephoto setting. (The covered area at the telephoto end is just barely inside the darker lines we use to frame the viewfinder accuracy target). As with the optical viewfinder, the smaller, 640 x 480 image sizes weren't too far off from the larger ones (about 96 percent coverage at wide angle and just over 100 percent accuracy at telephoto). We generally like to see the LCD monitor as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, so the C-3000 does a very good job in that respect. We also shot at the 2x digital telephoto setting (our studio isn't long enough to accommodate the full 2.5x), which probably would have produced close to 100 percent accuracy if framed properly. One problem with the digital telephoto is that framing is difficult because of the softer, slightly distorted image on the LCD. Additionally, the resulting image is somewhat soft, which is a usual side effect of the digital zoom.
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