I needed a new digital camera and fast and only having the ability to get to Argos (because of the late night opening times) the camera had to be available from Argos. The other criteria I set included a minimum of 12 mega pixels, face detection, a large screen, powered by AAA batteries and costing no more than £100. With the large number of cameras satisfying my criteria I thought I would have no problems in finding something suitable, it’s just a shame the Argos in Norwich is so poor and seems to have very little stock, so my choice was limited.

In the box is the X-42 itself, an XD – micro SD card adaptor, all necessary cables to link it up to a computer, a disc containing Olympus Master Software, a quick start guide and a further disc containing the user manual. The only thing it didn’t contain was some batteries, which surprised me somewhat.

Prior to going away I didn’t have time to learn to use the X-42, but given I had two weeks to play with it I thought it would be easy enough to do within a couple of days, after all it is a standard point and shoot camera and my other half’s Kodak took a few hours to learn how to take some pretty decent pictures with it. When I bough the X-42 I was hoping that it was going to have a decent user manual which I could read on the plane so I would have a bit of a heads up when I got to our destination. How wrong I was, like everything nowadays the written instructions were no more than a quick start guide with no more than 10 pages of information, most of which was useless. Don’t be fooled by the thickness of the guide as it contains every language you can think of, not much use unless you fancy a foreign language challenge.

One positive about the X-42 is the 5x optical zoom. It is actually quite good and it is much better than the 3x optical zoom my other half’s camera has.

The X-42 is an awful camera and Olympus should be ashamed of it. It looks and feels cheap and nasty, the screen is awful (and it has no view finder), the picture quality is terrible and it is not user friendly in any way. The technology is there to just ‘point and shoot’ and the camera will get a half decent picture using its “auto” modes, but the X-42 doesn’t behave like this.