Alan Stafford

Olympus C-50 Zoom

We haven't seen any other camera with the Olympus C-50 Zoom's combination of 5-megapixel resolution and sophisticated controls in a small, lightweight body. Cameras like Kyocera's FineCam S5 and Konica's Digital Revio KD-500Z have the same pixel count and even smaller bodies, but the C-50 offers more flexibility thanks to its manual exposure modes, which include aperture-priority, shutter-priority, full-manual, and six scene modes. Its aluminum body looks sleek, and a sturdy sliding cover protects the smooth, quiet zoom lens.
The C-50 Zoom isn't as easy to control as other Olympus models. Like those on the more-advanced C-5050 Zoom, its main menu controls consist of four rice-grain-size buttons around an OK button the size of a pencil eraser. But whereas the C-5050 also lets you navigate in other ways, such as by holding down a button on the camera and spinning a jog dial, the C-50 binds you to the menus for almost all functions, and the tiny buttons are stiff and hard to get at. A small dial controls the shooting mode (for example, full-auto, or one of the scene modes)--not an unusual arrangement, but one of the stops on the dial simply selects all of the manual modes. You must then enter a menu to specify which submode you want.
Despite its high-resolution CCD, the C-50 managed only middle-of-the-pack scores for image quality among cameras priced over$500. Most shots looked pleasingly sharp, but colors weren't as good as we'd hoped: Reds bled into orange, and a shot of our model that we took using the flash came out overexposed. The C-50's LI-10B battery lasted for 260 shots, or about 1.5 hours. That's well below the average for all the cameras we've tested, but it's slightly above the average for the compact models we've seen. A second battery costs about $50. You can resize JPEG images in the camera--good for squeezing in a couple more shots while on a trip. However, you can only adjust dimensions, not compression, and you can't do anything to a TIF file. Like Canon, Olympus includes a panorama mode to help you line up shots that you can later stitch together using software; and Olympus correctly locks the zoom and exposure after the first shot. Unlike Canon's stitching mode, however, Olympus's function doesn't show you previous shots to help you line them up, and you can take a maximum of only 10 shots in this mode. (Canon permits up to 26.)
On paper, the C-50 Zoom is very attractive: It's a small camera with high resolution, manual exposure modes, and a lower price than most other 5-megapixel models. But difficult controls and so-so image quality make the C-50 less spectacular than its specs might indicate.

Buying Information

Olympus C-50 Zoom $ http://