Olympus C-3000 ZoomOlympus develops a slightly slower, but lot cheaper version of the C-3030 Zoom. (Looks like a great bargain!)<<Reference: Datasheet :(Previous) | (Next): Print-Friendly Review Version>> C-3000 Zoom Test ImagesReview First Posted: 5/30/2000 |
We've begun including links in our reviews to a Thumber-generated index page for our test shots.
The Thumber data includes a host of information on the images, including
shutter speed, ISO setting, compression setting, etc. Rather than clutter
the page below with *all* that detail, we're posting the Thumber index so
only those interested in the information need wade through it! ;) |
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Outdoor
portrait: (1546k) This is a tough shot
for many digicams, due to the extreme tonal range (which is why we set it
up this way). The trick is to hold highlight and shadow detail without
producing a "flat" picture with muddy colors. We shot with both the automatic (1541k) and daylight (1546k) white balance
settings for this image, choosing daylight because it produced the most
accurate color balance. (The automatic setting appeared just a little bit
cool.) Nice color balance overall, although the blue flowers and pants
look a little dark, and also show some signs of the "purple blues"
problem. (Many digicams have a tendency to reproduce this tone with a
purplish hue. The C-3000 does this slightly, and also darkens the tone
somewhat.). We shot our main image at +0.7 EV which gave us the best
overall exposure, even though the highlight areas are rather "hot". - The
C-3000 produces fairly high-contrast images, with strong highlights and
deep shadows. Shadow detail is very good though, with very little noise:
With high-contrast subjects like this, you'll generally want to
underexpose slightly to preserve highlight detail, and boost the midtone
values after the fact in an imaging program. Resolution and detail are
excellent, with what looks to our eyes like a just-right amount of
in-camera sharpening. The table below shows the results of a range of
exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV in the daylight white balance
setting.
Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Closer
portrait: (1620k) The C-3000 does an
excellent job with this "portrait" shot, thanks in part to the camera's 3x
zoom lens. (Shorter focal length lenses tend to distort facial features in
close-up shots like this and the availability of longer focal lengths is a
key feature if you're going to be shooting close-up people shots). As
usual in this test, our main shot (1620k) didn't require any exposure adjustment. Resolution
and detail again look nice and crisp, with very little noise in the
shadows. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings
from zero to +1.3 EV in the daylight white balance setting.
Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Indoor
portrait, flash: (1584k) The C-3000 did
a really excellent job in this category as well. For our first series, we
pointed the camera's built-in flash directly at the subject and varied the
flash intensity setting (which is adjustable from -2.0 to +2.0 EV in 1/3
increments). Keeping the flash at the normal intensity setting produced this (1336k) slightly dark
image which has a moderate magenta cast and bluish highlight areas.
Boosting the flash intensity to +0.3 EV (1359k) produced a slightly brighter image, though still
with a bit of an overall magenta color shift. Next, we increased the flash
intensity to +0.7 EV (1390k),
which gave us a much nicer exposure with a better color balance.
The subject is well-illuminated with no harsh shadows. Finally, we set the
flash intensity to +1.0 EV (1427k), which is about the brightest we'd recommend for
this setup. Here, the image is much brighter, but we begin to see harsh
shadows against the background. Still, the highlight areas aren't too hot
and the color balance looks good overall. (Although the camera still shows
some of the blue/purple problem that seems so common with digicams.) We
also tried setting the camera's ISO to 400
(1753k) and boosting the flash sensitivity to +0.7 EV,
which gave us a very nice exposure with only a little noise (due to the
higher ISO setting). We then utilized the camera's Slow Shutter (1584k) setting
(also at the +0.7 EV sensitivity level), which gave us the best exposure
overall, and the image we selected as the main one for this category. Both
the ISO 400 and Slow Shutter images gave us nicer exposures by letting in
more ambient light, but we preferred the Slow Shutter version because of
its lower noise level. (Although the noise level at ISO 400 is not bad at
all, much better than many digicams we've seen). The C-3000 supports the dedicated Olympus FL-40 flash unit, which of course would produce far superior images than those obtained with the onboard flash. We didn't have an FL-40 available while testing the 3030 though, so you'll just have to use your imagination... (We've worked enough with internal/external flash setups that we're pretty confident in recommending the FL-40 for use with the 3030, even though we only tested that flash on the Olympus C-2500: If you're planning extensive indoor photography, the importance of an off-camera flash unit can't be overemphasized!) |
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Indoor
portrait, no flash: (1647k) This shot
is a very tough test of a camera's white balance capability, given the
strong, yellowish color cast of the household incandescent bulbs used for
the lighting and the C-3000 did a very nice job. We chose the incandescent (1647k) white
balance setting for our main shot, which was achieved with a +1.0 EV
adjustment in the exposure. The automatic (1658k) white balance setting resulted in a much warmer
image (also shot at +1.0 EV). The C-3000 does a great job picking up
detail in the shadow areas and the noise level is very low. We also shot
at the camera's 100 (1388k), 200 (1581k) and 400 (1723k) ISO settings and we're pleased to note that although
the noise level does increase somewhat with the higher settings, it still
remains very low and quite acceptable (IMHO) even at ISO 400. The table
below shows a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.7 EV in the
incandescent white balance setting with an automatic ISO setting.
Exposure Compensation Settings:
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House
shot: (1580k) NOTE that this is the
"new" house shot, a much higher-resolution poster than we first used in
our tests. To compare the C-3000 with previously tested cameras, here's a
shot of the original house poster at the flourescent (1598k) white
balance settings.
For this test, we shot with the automatic
(158k) and daylight (155k) white balance settings. The daylight produced warm
results, leading us to select the automatic setting because of its more
accurate color balance, although the final image still had a slightly warm
cast, and was slightly dark overall. Excellent resolution and detail
throughout though, especially in the tree limbs above the roof and in the
brick sections. We caught just a slight amount of softness at the corners
of the image, but not too bad. Color saturation also looks great. The
in-camera sharpening is almost perfect, just barely given away by the very
tiny halo around the dark and light edges of the house. From a resolution
standpoint, the C-3000 is just the slightest notch down from the very best
digicams we've tested to date, and that small difference can be largely
made up for by a low-radius unsharp masking operation in Photoshop(tm).
(We thought 0.3 pixels at 100% crisped things up very nicely.) We also
detected only a very small amount of noise in the shingles (possibly
largely due to the texture of the shingles themselves in the poster.)
Overall, the C-3000 does a very nice job. The table below shows our
standard resolution and quality series.
We also shot with the C-3000's variable sharpness settings, which seem to alter the contrast a little to adjust the sharpness. The high sharpness setting is very bright and contrasty, in addition to being a touch crisper than the normal setting. Likewise, the low sharpness setting has less contrast and a touch less sharpening. The results are below. Sharpness Variations:
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Far-Field
shot: (1697k) This image is shot at
infinity to test far-field lens performance. NOTE that this image cannot
be directly compared to the other "house" shot, which is a poster, shot in
the studio. The rendering of detail in the poster will be very different
than in this shot, and color values (and even the presence or absence of
leaves on the trees!) will vary in this subject as the seasons progress.
In general though, you can evaluate detail in the bricks, shingles and
window detail, and in the tree branches against the sky. Compression
artifacts are most likely to show in the trim along the edge of the roof,
in the bricks, or in the relatively "flat" areas in the windows.
We shot this series with the automatic (1697k) white balance setting, as it produced the most
accurate white values and overall color balance. This test is the
strongest test of detail of any we do, and the bright white of the central
bay window often tricks digicams into losing detail in that area. The
C-3000 did a wonderful job here and depicted all the details of the bay
window precisely. Resolution and detail look great, as does color balance
and saturation. We also shot at the 100 (1698k), 200 (1737k) and 400 (1775k) ISO settings, which did a nice job of exposing the
image without too much noise (although we did notice that the 400 setting
gave us a slightly darker exposure). The table below shows our standard
resolution and quality series at the automatic ISO setting.
Again, we shot a series with the C-3000's variable sharpness settings, which gave us similar results as with the House poster. Sharpness Variations:
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Lens Zoom Range: We've received a number of requests
from readers to take shots showing the lens focal length range of those
cameras with zoom lenses. Thus, we're happy to present you here with the
following series of shots, showing the field of view at full wide angle,
3x telephoto and 2.5x digital telephoto. While the digital telephoto
trades off resolution directly for size, we felt that the C-3000's digital
tele didn't lose sharpness quite as quickly as some do (Of course, the
best use of digital tele is when the camera is set to a smaller file size,
for images used on the web, or for other lower-resolution
applications.)
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"Musicians"
poster: (1469k) We shot this test with
the automatic (1469k), daylight (1474k) and fluorescent (1482k) white
balance settings. The cloudy setting produced very warm results (as you
might expect), while the daylight was just slightly warmer than the
automatic setting. Thus, we chose the automatic white balance for our main
series, because it produced the most accurate skin tones and overall color
balance. Resolution and detail look great--we always look at the subtle
detail of the bird's wings and the tiny silver threads on the Oriental
model's robe, which look pretty sharp as do the flowers in the blonde
model's hair. The majority of the small level of noise in the image seems
to be coming from the poster itself, so we're very pleased with the
C-3000's performance in this category. Below is our normal resolution and
quality series in the automatic white balance setting. Resolution/Quality series:
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Macro
shot: (1442k) The C-3000 does pretty
good job in the macro category, capturing a minimum area of 3.35 x 2.52
inches (85.21 x 63.91 mm). This is about an average minimum coverage area
among digicams we've tested, but the body threads of the C-3000 in
conjunction with Olympus' CLA-1 filter adapter permit the addition of
external macro lenses for much tighter focusing. Resolution, detail and
color all look good, although there's just a slight amount of softness on
the brooch (probably due to the limited depth of field when shooting this
close). On the 2.5x digital telephoto (1787k) setting, the C-3000 captures a minimum area of 0.94
x 0.70 inches (23.77 x 17.03 mm) but the image is rather soft as a result
of the digital zoom. Still, the digital telephoto manages to do a good job
of capturing a very small area with fair resolution. The C-3000's flash (693k) does a reasonably
good job of throttling down for macro images, although the shiny coin
proves to be a bit tricky (as is the case with many digicams). Overall,
though, we're pretty pleased with the results. |
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"Davebox" test
target: (1038K) The C-3000 performs nicely on
this test as well. We shot with the daylight
(704K), cloudy (705K) and automatic (704K) white balance settings, choosing automatic as the
most accurate overall. Cloudy produced very warm results, as did the
daylight setting, which was just a little bit warmer than the automatic.
Even the automatic setting had a warmer cast than we'd like though. We did
find though, that the image cleaned up wonderfully in Photoshop with a
simple levels adjustment, as seen here. The
large color blocks on the left side of the box look very good, although
the yellow is slightly weak. The C-3000 wasn't fooled by the sometimes
tricky red and magenta color blocks on the middle, horizontal color chart
(many digicams have trouble here and try to blend the colors into one) or
the subtle tonal variations in the "B" range of the Q60 chart, which are
completely visible. The shadow area of the briquettes shows a lot of
detail and there's barely any noise. Other than the overall slightly warm
cast, color balance overall is very nice. Following is our standard
resolution and quality series. Resolution/Quality series:
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Low-Light Tests The C3000 Zoom performed very well in our low light tests, producing very usable images down to light levels of 1/8 of a foot-candle. (We're chiding ourselves for not having gone down to 1/16 of a foot-candle, since it's our guess that we would have obtained usable if not somewhat dim pictures at that level as well.) At these low light levels, with exposure times of 2 to 10 seconds, there is a moderate amount of noise present in the images. (We direct readers to Mike Chaney's excellent Qimage Pro program, for a tool with an amazing ability to remove image noise without significantly affecting detail.) To put the C3000's low light performance in perspective, an average city night scene under modern street lighting corresponds to a light level of about 1 foot-candle. We've recently changed our test procedure to insure that the cameras we test are at a uniform 70 degrees F (~21 C) when we shoot the low light tests, and we proceed from the lowest light levels to the brightest. This insures that the camera electronics and sensor are at their lowest temperature when we test under the most sensitive conditions (longest exposures, highest ISO settings). CCD noise levels are very sensitive to temperature, doubling every 6-8 degrees C. Thus, if you attempt a low-light shot after running the camera continuously for an hour or two, you'd probably get drastically worse results than those shown here. Likewise, if you were taking pictures on a winter night and the camera had equilibrated to the low air temperature, your results could be substantially better.
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Flash Range Test (This test was added in August 1999, so cameras tested before that time won't have comparison pictures available. As we go forward though, all the new models will have similar tests available). Olympus rates the C-3000's flash out to a maximum of 18.4 feet (5.6m) under its normal intensity setting, which is consistent with our findings. We shot this test using the normal flash intensity setting combined with the auto, 100, 200 and 400 ISO levels. Under the automatic ISO setting, we found the flash still very bright at the 14 foot mark, with no noticeable reduction in brightness. At ISO 100, the flash was still effective out to 14 feet, although not quite as bright. ISO 200 produced similar results to automatic and ISO 400 was noticeably brighter with a slightly higher noise level. Below are samples showing range of distances for each ISO setting from eight to 14 feet. Flash Range/Distance, Automatic:
Flash Range/Distance, ISO 100:
Flash Range/Distance, ISO 200:
Flash Range/Distance, ISO 400:
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ISO 12233 ("WG-18")
resolution target: The Olympus C-3000 performed toward the top of
the current range of 3.3 megapixel digicams in the resolution department,
with a resolution that we "called" as between 850 and 900 lines per
picture height in both the horizontal and vertical directions. While just
a hair off from the sharpest performance we've seen to date, the 3030
deserves credit for not applying heavy-handed in-camera sharpening in an
attempt to boost the apparent resolution. Overall, we by far prefer a more
understated approach to in-camera sharpening, as practiced in the C-3000:
If we want heavier sharpening, it's always easy to add after the fact in
an imaging program. If there's too much to begin with though, you're
stuck, and there's nothing to do... Overall, we rate the C-3000 quite well
in the sharpness/resolution area. In the resolution series below, we
exercised all of the camera's resolution settings (a total of
five), leaving us grasping for adjectives to describe the various size
options. We finally settled on calling the images Giant, Large, Medium,
Small, and Tiny, the largest being the full-size 2048z1536 dimension, and
"Tiny" corresponding to the 640x480 "VGA" resolution. (It wasn't very many
years ago that 640x480 was the biggest a digicam image got - We're sure
progressed in the intervening time!) See the tables below for a full
assortment of images shot in all size/quality settings, at both wide angle
and telephoto focal lengths. Resolution/Quality series, Wide Angle:
Resolution/Quality series, Telephoto:
Resolution/Quality series, Digital Telephoto:
Sharpness Variations:
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Viewfinder accuracy/flash uniformity
target: We found the C-3000's optical viewfinder to be a little tight,
showing approximately 82 percent accuracy at wide
angle (728k) and about 81 percent at telephoto (685k). (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 (53k) and telephoto (50k). We also
noticed that the framing here slants just a little to the left vertically,
possibly the CCD on our test model was shifted a little. The LCD monitor
proved to be much more accurate, showing about 97 percent frame coverage
at wide angle (721k) and
slightly over 100 percent accuracy at the telephoto (687k) setting.
(The covered area 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 accuracy at wide angle (52k) and over 100 percent accuracy at telephoto) (51k). We
generally like to see the LCD monitor as close to 100 percent accuracy as
possible, so the C-3000 does a pretty good job in that respect. We also
shot at the 2x digital telephoto (516k) setting (our studio wasn'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.
Geometric distortion on the C-3000 was moderate at the wide angle end,
as we measured a 0.76 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto showed a
smaller, 0.29 percent pincushion distortion. Both numbers are about
typical among digicams we've tested, but we do prefer to see lower
distortion at the wide angle end. (Just to be clear, roughly 0.8 percent
is pretty typical, we'd just like to see *all* digicams have lower barrel
distortion.) Chromatic aberration was fairly pronounced at wide angle
settings, with several pixels of color showing at the edges of elements on
our resolution test target. At the telephoto end of the lens' range
though, chromatic aberration was essentially invisible.. (This distortion
is visible as a very slight colored fringe around objects at the edges of
the field of view on the resolution target). The chromatic aberration was
more severe at the wide angle end than the average for cameras we've
tested, while it was much better than average at the telephoto
end. |
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