Olympus C-3040 ZoomOlympus updates its top-of-the-line 3-megapixel model with a "faster" lens and increased movie capabilities.<<Reference: Datasheet :(Previous) | (Next): Print-Friendly Review Version>> C-3040 Zoom Test ImagesReview First Posted: 4/14/2001 |
| 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: (1804 k) The extreme tonal range of this image makes it a tough shot for many digicams, which is precisely why we set it up this way. The object is to hold highlight and shadow detail without producing a "flat" picture with muddy colors, and the Olympus C-3040 Zoom does a good job. We shot samples of this image with the automatic (662 k), daylight (662 k), and manual (664 k) white balance settings, with all three settings producing similar results. The automatic and daylight settings both produced rather cool, nearly identical images, with the automatic setting appearing just the least bit cooler. The manual setting is a little warmer than the other two shots, with slightly better looking skin tones and overall color balance, so we chose it for our main series. Overall color is a little flat, and the blues of the flowers and pants appear violet instead of royal blue. (These blues are hard for many digicams to reproduce correctly, and we've found a violet cast to be surprisingly common.) We also noticed that the house siding is a little gray, instead of a creamy beige. However, the bright, red flower (another common problem area) appears in-check, without too much brightness or loss of detail. Overall resolution looks very nice, with a lot of fine detail visible throughout the image. Small details are also nice and crisp. The shadow areas show good detail, with fairly low noise. Our main image was taken with a +0.7 EV exposure adjustment to get the best exposure in the shadow areas without overexposing the bright highlights. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Closer portrait: (1625 k) The C-3040 Zoom also does a nice job with this closer, portrait shot, thanks to its 3x 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.) We again shot with the manual white balance setting, which still produced a slightly cool cast. As is typical with this shot, resolution appears much higher throughout the image, with very crisp details. The sunlit strands of hair can almost be counted, and the tiniest details around the model's face are completely visible. The background texture of the house siding is visible too. Color remains a little flat, probably from the high contrast of the sunlight. Noise level is moderately low in the shadow areas, with traces visible in the house siding. Our main shot was taken with no exposure adjustment.. The table below shows the results of a range of exposure settings from zero to +1.3 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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Indoor Portrait, Flash: (1677 k) The C-3040 Zoom's built-in flash does a good job of illuminating the subject and producing a bright exposure, though color appears a little flat. We first shot with the internal flash and no exposure adjustment, which produced this (1631 k) reasonably well lit shot. A slight orange cast appears in the background from the strong household incandescent lighting, and the model is dimly lit. Still, a fair amount of detail is visible, and despite the flat appearance, color looks nearly accurate. Next, we adjusted the flash intensity to +0.7 EV (1357 k), which brightened the exposure and decreased the orange cast slightly. Though the model is better lit, a blue cast from the flash washes her face, shirt, and flowers. Finally, we kept the flash at the +0.7 EV intensity level, but this time shot with a slower shutter speed (1677 k) to allow more ambient light into the image. The resulting image showed a slightly stronger orange cast in the background, however, the overall exposure looks much better. The bluish cast from the flash is still present, but diminished, and overall color appears slightly brighter. We chose this for our main image, as it resulted in the best exposure overall. - The C-3040's ability to control flash and ambient exposure independently is a great boon for photographers interested in subtle indoor lighting effects. Very nice control! |
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Indoor portrait, no flash: (1687 k) This shot is always 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-3040 Zoom's white balance system did a great job with it. We shot samples of this image with the automatic (1732 k), incandescent (1726 k), and manual (1692 k) white balance settings, choosing the manual setting for our main series. The automatic setting resulted in a warm, orangish image, while the incandescent setting produced brownish, almost sepia results. Color balance appeared the most accurate with the manual setting, with no strong color casts. Overall color looks pretty good, though the blue flowers are more violet than blue. The green leaves of the flower bouquet appear a little flat, but skin tones look natural and just about right. (Contrast is just a little high overall though.) Details are nice and sharp, with a fair amount of fine detail visible. We chose an exposure adjustment of +0.7 EV for our main image, as anything above that began to overexpose the highlight areas. We also shot with the 100 (1707 k), 200 (1641 k), and 400 (1592 k) ISO settings, noticing that noise level increased with each higher setting as anticipated. Noise is moderate at the 100 ISO setting, but increases to fairly high at 400 ISO. Color seemed to fade as the ISO setting increased, with the 400 ISO setting resulting in a very cool, bluish image with very pale skin tones. Color looked the most accurate and vibrant at 100 ISO. The table below shows a range of exposures from zero to +1.3 EV. Exposure Compensation Settings:
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House shot: (1599 k) NOTE that this is the "new" house shot, a much higher-resolution poster than we first used in our tests. To compare the image of the C-3040 Zoom with previously tested cameras, here's a shot of the original house poster in the automatic (1506 k) white balance setting. We shot samples of this image with the daylight (1697 k), automatic (1692 k), and manual (1705 k) white balance settings, none of which produced dead-on, accurate results. The daylight setting produced a very warm cast, while the manual setting resulted in a very cool, bluish image. Automatic came closest to being accurate, though the overall color balance was still just a little warm. We tried to cool the automatic white balance by increasing the blue tones (available through the C-3040 Zoom's Mode Setup menu), adjusting the white balance to +1 (1602 k) and +2 (1607 k) on the blue scale. These adjustments definitely reduced the warm cast, but ultimately made the image too blue. Thus, we chose the original automatic setting for our resolution series. Despite the slightly warm cast, color looks pretty good throughout the image. Resolution is very good, with a lot of fine detail visible in the bricks and shrubbery, and in the tree limbs above the roof. Details are pretty sharp for the most part, though we noticed a fair amount of corner softness in all four corners of the image. The strongest amount of corner softness appears at top left and top right. The roof shingles and shadows show a reasonably low noise level, and in-camera sharpening shows up as just the tiniest bit of a halo around the light and dark edges of the white trim along the roof line. The table below shows a range of resolution and quality settings.
Sharpness Series We also shot a series with the camera's adjustable sharpness settings, which altered the overall brightness and contrast just slightly. The Hard and Soft settings made subtle changes to the overall sharpness, without going too far in either direction.
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Far-Field Test (1551 k) 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 image with the automatic white balance setting, which produced a slightly cool cast throughout the image, especially in the white highlights. This shot is a strong test of detail, given the practically infinite range of fine detail in a natural scene like this, viewed from a distance. Resolution looks great, especially in the tree branches above the house, as well as in the bricks and house front details. We can just barely detect the stronger details in the sunny areas of the wooden fence behind the house (visible on the driveway side). Overall sharpness looks very good, with crisp details. We again noticed some corner softness in the image, this time quite apparent at all four corners. (Along with a fair bit of chromatic aberration.) We also judge a camera's dynamic range in this shot, comparing how well the camera holds detail in both the shadow and highlight areas. The C-3040 Zoom handles the bright, white paint of the bay window well, capturing most of the stronger details, as well as some of the fainter ones. The shadow area under the porch also fares reasonably well, as the brick pattern and porch light details are just barely visible. We shot with the 100 (1549 k), 200 (1568 k), and 400 (1592 k) ISO settings, noticing that noise level increased from moderately low at the 100 ISO setting to high at the 400 ISO setting. Overall color seemed to weaken in saturation as the ISO level increased, with the 400 ISO setting producing very flat color. The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series.
Sharpness Series We again shot with the C-3040 Zoom's adjustable sharpness setting, which continued to produce very subtle results. Brightness and contrast are only slightly affected, and the levels of sharpness and softness are within reason.
Contrast Series We also shot with the C-3040 Zoom's adjustable contrast setting, which produced very dramatic results. The Low setting is significantly dimmer than normal, with an increased blue cast. High contrast setting brightens the overall image a fair amount, and appears to increase saturation as well.
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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 with the lens at full wide angle, the lens at full 3x telephoto, and at full telephoto with the 2.5x digital telephoto enabled. The C-3040 Zoom's wide angle setting captures a very wide field of view, with good detail. A hint of barrel distortion is visible along the curb of the street, but the overall image looks nice. Detail and resolution increase with the 3x telephoto lens setting, with increased image sharpness as well. Resolution and sharpness decrease with the 2.5x digital zoom, though the noise level appears to be unaffected. The bluish cast of the wide angle and 3x telephoto shots turns greenish with the 2.5x digital zoom. Still, a reasonably good performance for digital telephoto.
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Musicians Poster (1690 k) For this test, we shot with the automatic (1660 k), daylight (1673 k), and manual (1686 k) white balance settings, this time choosing the manual setting for our main series. The large amount of blue in the image often tricks digicams into overcompensating, and we noticed that the C-3040 Zoom's automatic and daylight white balance settings responded by producing a warm cast. The manual setting resulted in a very cool image, with very pale skin tones. Despite these cool skin tones, we chose the manual setting because the overall color balance appeared to be the most accurate. The blue of the Oriental model's robe is about right, with good saturation (this is a difficult blue for digicams to reproduce). Resolution looks pretty high, with nearly all of the fine detail in the bird wings and silver threads of the model's robe visible. Even the more subtle details of the smaller bird are mostly visible. The violin strings are nice and sharp as well, as are the beaded necklaces and flower garland (though corner softness blurs the left portion of the flower garland). Noise is moderately low and mostly visible in the blue background (some noise could be from the poster itself). The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series. Resolution/Quality Series
Sharpness Series We again shot with the C-3040 Zoom's sharpness adjustments, noticing slightly higher contrast with the Hard setting. The noise pattern also became more noticeable with the Hard setting, though overall brightness seemed about the same.
Contrast Series We also shot a range of contrast adjustments, noticing stark differences between the settings. The High setting produced very bright results, while the Low contrast setting resulted in a very dim image. Highlights in the High setting also appeared on the verge of washing out.
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Macro Shot (1462 k) The C-3040 does pretty good job in the macro category, capturing a minimum area of 3.21 x 2.41 inches (81.5 x 61.1 mm). This is about an average minimum coverage area among digicams we've tested, but the body threads of the C-3040 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, and both the brooch and dollar bill are well-focused. (We do see just the slightest softness on the bill, due to the shallow depth of field when shooting this close.) . The C-3040's flash (1575 k) does a pretty good job of throttling down for macro images, better than most in that respect. Overall, a good performance. |
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"Davebox" Test Target (2141 k) We shot samples of this target using the automatic (2134 k), daylight (2144 k), and manual (2141 k) white balance settings, choosing the manual setting as the most accurate. Both daylight and automatic white balance settings produced warm images, with the daylight setting producing the warmest cast. Alternatively, the manual setting appeared somewhat cool, though it still produced the most accurate white value overall. The large color blocks look pretty good, though the large cyan and yellow blocks are a little weak. The large, kelly green block also appears a little undersaturated, but the red block is bright and vibrant. The C-3040 Zoom accurately distinguishes the subtle difference between the red and magenta color blocks on the middle, horizontal color chart (which is a common problem area for many digicams), even reproducing the black separator line without a strong magenta cast. Exposure looks about right, as the subtle tonal variations of the Q60 chart are visible all the way up to the "B" range (this is another common problem area for digicams). The tonal gradations of the smaller, vertical gray scales also look very good, with the two darkest blocks just barely distinguishable from each other. Good detail is visible in the shadow area of the charcoal briquettes, with low noise. Likewise, the white gauze area also shows a nice amount of detail. Resolution looks great overall, with good detail in the box hinges and silver disk, and the mini resolution target appears reasonably sharp. We also shot with the 100 (2106 k), 200 (1561 k), and 400 (1646 k) ISO settings, noticing that the noise level increased to moderately high with the 400 ISO setting. Exposure brightened just slightly with the 400 ISO setting, and the large color blocks decreased in saturation. The table below shows our standard resolution and quality series. Resolution/Quality Series
Contrast Series We also shot with the C-3040 Zoom's contrast adjustments, which also affected image brightness and saturation. The High setting resulted in a very bright image with increased saturation, while the Low setting dimmed the image and decreased saturation.
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Low-Light Tests The C-3040 Zoom performed nicely in the low-light category, as we were able to obtain bright, clear images at light levels as low as 1/16 of a foot-candle (0.67 lux), at all three ISO settings. We did notice that images captured from 1/8 of a foot-candle on up to 1/2 of a foot-candle (1.3 to 5.5 lux) appeared slightly dimmer than at the 1/16 of a foot-candle setting, but images were still bright and clear with good detail visible. Noise remained moderate with the 100 and 200 ISO settings, increasing slightly with the 400 ISO setting. However, the noise pattern was pretty stark at all three ISO settings, with bright pink and green speckles throughout the image. (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 C-3040 Zoom's low-light performance into perspective, an average city night scene under modern street lighting corresponds to a light level of about one foot-candle, so the camera should easily handle even much darker situations. The table below shows the best exposure we were able to obtain for each of a range of illumination levels. Images in this table (like all of our sample photos) are untouched, exactly as they came from the camera.
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Flash Range Test Olympus rates the C-3040 Zoom's flash as effective from 2.6 to 18 feet (0.8 to 5.6 m), which falls in line with our test results. We found the C-3040 Zoom's flash brightest at the eight foot distance, but decreased only very slightly with each foot of distance, and was still quite bright at our maximum test distance of 15 feet. Below is our flash range series, with distances from eight to 15 feet from the target.
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ISO-12233 (WG-18) Resolution Test (1088 k) The C-3040 performed quite well in our resolution test. Center resolution is very high, easily extending to 800 lines per picture height in both horizontal and vertical directions, and with strong detail visible all the way out to 1000 lines on our resolution target. Unfortunately, one consequence of the unusually "fast" lens design is that optical distortion on the C-3040 is rather high at the wide angle end, where we measured an approximate 1.0 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared much better, where we found approximately 0.2 percent pincushion distortion. Corner sharpness also suffered at wide angle, and chromatic aberration is a bit higher than average. All forms of distortion improve markedly toward the telephoto end of the lens' range. Resolution Series, Wide Angle
Sharpness Series
Resolution Series, Telephoto
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Viewfinder Accuracy/Flash Uniformity We found the C-3040 Zoom's optical viewfinder to be a little tight, showing approximately 84.1 percent of the final image area at wide angle (648 k), and about 84.5 percent at telephoto (685 k) (at the 2,048 x 1,536, 1,280 x 960, and 640 x 480 image sizes). We also noticed that the final image is shifted towards the top of the frame, with extra space on the remaining three sides. The LCD monitor fared much better, showing approximately 96.7 percent accuracy at wide angle (660 k), and about 97.3 percent at telephoto (687 k) (also for the 2,048 x 1,536, 1,280 x 960, and 640 x 480 image sizes). Since we generally like to see LCD monitors as close to 100 percent accuracy as possible, the C-3040 Zoom does an excellent job. Flash distribution is fairly even at the telephoto setting, with a slight reflection present at the center of the target. At the wide angle setting, flash distribution also looks good, with a little falloff at the corners of the target. As noted above, one consequence of the unusually "fast" lens design of the C-3040 is that optical distortion is rather high at the wide angle end, where we measured an approximate 1.0 percent barrel distortion. The telephoto end fared much better, where we found approximately 0.2 percent pincushion distortion. Corner sharpness also suffered at wide angle, and chromatic aberration is a bit higher than average. All forms of distortion improve markedly toward the telephoto end of the lens' range. |
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