"Picky Details" for the Olympus D-370 digital camera
(Timing, Power, and Storage Info)
Timing
We measure both cycle times and shutter delay times, using a proprietary Imaging
Resource test system. Here are the numbers we collected for the D-370:
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| Power On -> First shot |
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Time from power-up to first shot. Pretty fast.
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| Shutdown |
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Very fast, since no lens to retract.
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| Play to Record, first shot |
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Time until first shot is captured. A bit faster than
average.
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| Record to play |
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Time from shutter press to seeing the image in playback
mode. A bit slower than average.
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| Shutter lag, full autofocus |
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Very fast. (Focus-free lens?) |
| Shutter lag, prefocus |
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Lag time when shutter button is half-pressed and held
before the shot itself. Faster than average.
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| Cycle Time, max/min resolution |
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Very fast from shot to shot, and you can shoot up to 10 frames before the buffer fills. |
| Cycle time, continuous mode ("Burst 2" mode) |
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Quite fast. Can capture about 40 frames before buffer fills. (Saves images in SQ2 mode.) |
Overall, the D-370 is a speedy little camera! It starts up and shuts down quickly, has a much lower than average shutter delay, and is very quick from shot to shot. Very impressive for an inexpensive camera! If it only had a zoom lens (to get closer to the action), it'd make a great camera for shooting kid's sports!)
Power
The D-370 uses AA batteries, and ships with a set of alkaline cells. We
routinely test cameras for power drain, here's what we found for the D-370:
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| Capture Mode, w/LCD |
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| Capture Mode, no LCD |
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| Half-pressed shutter w/LCD |
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| Half-pressed w/o LCD |
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| Memory Write (transient) |
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| Flash Recharge (transient) |
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| Image Playback |
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Battery life has always been an issue with digicams, but Olympus seems to have really gotten a handle on it with the D-370! We still strongly recommend buying two sets of rechargeable NiMH AA batteries and a good charger, but the D-370 is one of the few cameras we've seen that could actually be used with alkaline cells. The runtime estimates above are based on good-quality NiMH rechargeables, but they're very impressive: Over three hours of continuous operation in capture mode with the LCD on, almost limitless on-time with the LCD off, and over four hours of continuous playback time. Very nice!
Storage Capacity
The D-370 accepts SmartMedia cards, but comes with 2 megabytes of internal
memory. (So you don't even need a card to get started using the camera.) The
internal memory doesn't seem to provide the same number of images per megabyte
as SmartMedia cards do, so we're not sure of how the storage space is actually
allocated. We're thus not able to provide the image-compression information
in this table below, for when the camera is running from its own internal memory.
We think you'll definitely want to purchase a SmartMedia card with it, a 16MB
card will hold 25 shots in maximum-quality mode. Here's how the camera's storage
capacity breaks down as a function of image size and quality settings:
| Resolution/Quality vs Image Capacity |
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("SHQ") |
("HQ") |
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("SQ1") |
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("SQ2") |
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