Olympus C-770 UZ

A little while ago I was in the market for a new digital camera, my current (and first) was a Fujifilm MX-1500 which was a pretty nice camera for its time and served me well. It was pretty basic though, the resolution (1.5MP - 1280x1024) was low by modern standards plus it both a lacked zoom and movie mode.

I was particularly interested in a camera with a decent movie mode. For a time I owned a JVC DV camcorder which produced nice videos but wasn't getting enough use so it ended up on eBay. The problem with the camcorder was partly the size of the thing but mostly that if I was going anywhere I'd have to carry two things to perform both tasks, so a dual-mode device seemed to be the answer.

There's two ways to go here of course, something which is mostly a camcorder but can take mediocre photos or something which is mostly a still camera but can take mediocre movies. I went for the second option.

The C770 is an "Ultra Zoom" camera so its bound to be larger than say something from the Canon IXUS range. However, within this category its pretty compact. I held a friends Minolta DiMAGE A1 and that's a big camera.

The user-interface is pretty good, the options are fairly easy to find, well-labelled and generally clear. One thing I particularly like is the motor-drive, being able to just hold the button and rattle off a number of shots is very useful. The good UI here is that if motor-drive is on and a timer mode photo is taken, the camera will take five shots in quick succession. I don't know if other cameras do this but I thought it was a nice touch.

What I really wanted to talk about was the movie mode on the camera. When I was shopping around I set the standard at 640x480 at 30fps. The availability of this quality, or even better, is naturally improving over time but is still pretty variable. Take Canon for example, the S1 IS manages 640x480@30 (with some restrictions) whilst the newer G6 only manages 640x480@10 and then for only 30 seconds. You'd have thought its just a matter of processor speed and firmware support and its strange to see Canon go backwards like that.

But anyway, the C770 supports 640x480@30 with MPEG4 encoding. This is less sharp then say MJPEG as used in other places but produces much smaller files. I'll come back to this later.

Like a lot of cameras you can't use the optical zoom whilst recording. The reason for this is that the microphone would pick-up the motor noise. Digital zoom is available, and performs reasonably up to about 3x. I don't like the optical zoom ban, it should at least be an option. For example, you might want to reposition the shot without having to stop and restart, nothing wrong with that, especially if something unexpected has happened.

The C770 does redeem itself slightly though. First off, I should mention that it supports the use of an external microphone which I thoroughly approve of. Secondly, if you use an external microphone the optical zoom is unlocked. So you could just get a plug-in mic and leave it at that, although this would require the side flap to be open all the time where it might get damaged.

The C770 doesn't have a maximum movie recording time that I know of. It does, however, make poor use of available memory. The encoder is variable bit-rate so the amount of space needed per second depends on what's being captured. This in turn means the maximum recording time for a given amount of available memory depends on what is going to be recorded.

Short of psychic powers, the camera can't predict the maximum recording time. The C770s approach to this problem is to calculate the minimum possible time based on a worst-case scenario and uses this as the recording time limit.

The problem with this method is that if an ongoing recording is not worst-case the camera does not extend the recording time. That is, the recording is limited to the initial 'quote' regardless of how much space on the card actually gets used. Once this recording is finished, if there is any card storage left you are then able to make another recording which, again, will be limited to the worst-case quote. And so on...

As an example of where this is a pain, I was recording a thirty minute presentation which was fairly low-motion and the camera was placed on a table, so as not to suffer from shake. I was using a blank 256MB card. The camera set the recording limit to 15:05, which works out to a worst-case bit-rate of 2260Kbit/s. Now, this scene was easy to encode and so the file produced only had a bit-rate of 915Kbit/s. So, if the camera instead of limiting the recording to the initial quote had just carried on until the card was full it would have been able to record for 37 minutes, and I'd have been a happy bunny.

Based on these numbers below are the recording times you can expect for various card capacities and bit-rates. Note that these values are based on 'real megabytes', not the slightly lower value you get after formatting a card. Remember that the 2260 column tells you the maximum length of a single movie on a blank card. I should also point out I'm making no guarantees on how long a single battery lasts when recording video.

The configuration options on movie mode are pretty limited, other than digital zoom on/off, sound on/off the only options are the basic quality setting. This is a choice of 640x480@30 (MPEG4) and 640x480@15, 320x240@15, 160x120@15 (MJPEG). I suppose you might want the 640x480@15 if you fancy sharper frames over frame-rate. But there really is little point in the 320x240@15 since it still produces bigger files than the 640x480@30 MPEG4 setting although I suppose in some high-shake cases it would produce better looking files. As for 160x120@15, well, what can you say?

What I'd like to see is a de-coupling of the three factors of resolution, codec and frame-rate, and allow the user to choose which option under each they prefer. I think it's pretty safe to drop the 160x120 option completely as it's just too depressing.

It would also be nice to alter the MPEG4 options in terms of the quality coefficient, i.e. a tendency to produce larger or smaller files.

The C770 takes xD memory. I've never been particularly happy about this as I can't see the point of anything other than SD or Compact Flash. CF when you have the physical space, SD when you don't. Any other format is just fleecing the customer. Let me show you how. I sampled the inc. VAT price for Lexar branded media of each of four types from a large, well-known on-line shop. At the time of writing the scores are:

Obviously these prices are going to date pretty quickly, it's more the ratios that are interesting. I know that you can probably get cheaper instances of a type by buying un-branded or slower memory. For example, right now I can get 1GB of SD for only £70. But even so, that just emphasises that the users of the common types are getting a much better deal. What do xD and Memory Stick users get for the extra money? Not much.

Also, notice the dash in the xD 1GB column. Why? There aren't any 1GB xD cards regardless of cost. Never mind that Compact Flash users can have access to >1GB cards and Microdrives. If Fujifilm/Olympus/Sony want to play with silly memory formats then they should at least make them price and feature competitive.

OK, so the C770 has high memory costs and lacks the higher capacities. But does this matter? Well, maybe. The cost of 256MB xD card isn't massively more than SD/CF and good for 92 shots on the highest JPEG setting. I have filled this amount up on one days photography, mostly due to using the motor drive to take five shots a time. But by and large I'm happy with 256MB for stills.

Now for video it's a different matter. I've talked about the problems with the time estimation for video recording. If this problem was fixed 256MB would be more useful although I'd still be tempted to jump to 512MB. As things stand I could use 1GB.

The C770 comes with a suite of software I don't use. This is a general thing with me, I prefer to stick with the applications I already know then muck around with less powerful freebies and have a systray full of junk.

I clocked transfers from the camera to the PC over a USB 2 link at around 770KB/s.

So a quick summary. The C770 is a nice camera, it's a reasonable size, takes good photos and is well featured. The movie mode is good providing the camera is supported (tripod or similar).

My major niggles are the artificial recording time limits, the memory card format and lack of image stabiliser. Of those, the first one could be fixed with a firmware update. My gut says that Olympus lack the inclination, but I'd love to be proved wrong.