Olympus C-3000 3.2MP s a powerful camera with many advanced features. It offers USB connectivity for high-speed image downloading and also includes a removable 8 MB SmartMedia storage card. You can record four seconds of sound in still mode and make a 60-second QuickTime movie with sound. The C-3000 Zoom captures many of your favorite activities and moments with ease.
Olympus has added several image effects to enhance your creative choices, including black- and-white and sepia modes for shooting monochrome images. The high-powered lens features an all-glass, eight-element 3x zoom that produces clear normal shots as well as close-ups. A six-mode flash system allows shooting in a variety of light conditions, and you can choose which ISO equivalent is most appropriate for each shot. You also have full exposure control with aperture and shutter priority, as well as manual exposure, for fine-tuning your pictures.
Helpful consumer’s review
Before I saw this family of cameras in action, I didn’t have an interest in digital photography. The company I worked for bought a C-3030 and I was called over to set it up. As I worked with it, I became more and more impressed. The USB connection is blazingly fast (assuming you’re using Win95/98/2000), the LCD is sharp and bright, and the processing of the pictures themselves is very fast. Then I actually looked at a picture taken at 2048×1536 and my jaw dropped. Using just the defaults for white balance, ISO, shutter, etc., the picture it took of a hedge of flowers was amazing. Both the C-3030 and C-3000 have outstanding picture quality due to the well-designed Olympus optics and let you manually set just about everything for that perfect picture.
I searched around and bought a C-3000 because the greater onboard memory buffer of the C-3030 wasn’t all that important to me, I didn’t need Photoshop LE, and I was going to buy a 64 MB card for it anyway. The $200 you save, in my opinion, makes this a much better buy than the C-3030.
One photography magazine labeled the C-3030 “the camera for nerds” due to all the options you can set. If you’re into it, this camera will let you explore photography as an art form. I’m still learning what I can do with it, but it’s already produced some beautiful photos.
One recommendation I have is to buy a CD burner. Photo albums on CD save a mess of hard drive space and are a great way to permanently store pictures and then show them off to friends.
Finally, there is one feature that I don’t see mentioned much elsewhere. In the panorama mode, if you take pictures in a complete 360, the Camedia software lets you create Quicktime VR movies out of them. This lets you truly express the feeling of being at a place. I did one at Lambeau Field and you do feel like you’re in the crowd when viewing it.
