Great first digital camera

I had never owned (or even used) a digital camera, but with prices coming down all the time and quality improving I decided it was time to experience for myself the cost effectiveness, convenience and fun of having one. Having a digital camera has meant that I take many more photos than previously using film, simply because photos are free unless you choose to print them: they may simply be thrown away. I wanted a camera with around 3 Megapixel resolution (having read that this gives good quality printed photos up to around 10”x8”), optical zoom and LCD viewfinder, and a price tag of no more than £250. Having owned it for a couple of months, I am very pleased with my choice of the Olympus mju 300 Digital.

I shall run through the camera’s features, commenting where appropriate!:

• The camera uses tiny (less than an inch square!) xD Picture Cards – a new format of memory card fairly recently developed by Olympus and Fuji. Apparently these new cards may be read from and written to more quickly than rival types, though I have no personal experience of this. The cards are a little more expensive than alternative types, but not excessively so. The camera came with only a 16MB card (capable of storing 6, or 20 pictures on the top two resolutions respectively), so I purchased two 128MB cards for a total of about £70, which was a good price – it’s worth looking around for good deals available before buying extra memory. A 128MB card will store about 45 top quality photos, or about 150 at the next highest resolution, or over 700 low quality images.

• The camera offers optical zoom (using a conventional zoom lens, without deterioration of quality) of up to 3x magnification. In addition there is up to 5x digital zoom, which simply involves the camera cropping the central portion of the image and expanding it to fill the photo, hence degrading the quality. I find that quality is only severely impaired if more than 2 to 3x digital zoom is used: before that image quality remains high, and the zoom facility allows added versatility of photography, and is a novelty at first (if you haven’t had a zoom camera before, as I hadn’t!). The two combined zooms therefore allow up to an impressive 15x zoom. The digital zoom is handily not enabled by default, to prevent its accidental use and resultant quality reduction. I find this useful, as I rarely need or want to zoom beyond the capacity of the 3x optical zoom.

• The ‘white balance’ may be adjusted to ensure that white objects appear white whether illuminated by the Sun, in overcast conditions, or lit by a tungsten filament (light bulb) or fluorescent tube. This works well, though I have yet to find a situation where the automatic mode did not make the correct choice, so I don’t often use this particular option!

• The panorama option allow the taking of a sequence of photos either left to right or up and down, to capture an image too large to fit in one photo. These images may then be automatically stitched together in the camera software (but only if taken using the panorama option!).

• All the above options (except the zoom, which has separate buttons for zooming in and out) are accessed through an intuitively usable menu system using arrow keys and an OK button on the camera to select options. There is no facility to manually adjust the length of the exposure used. This is an option available on many of the camera’s competitors, and I feel is one of the greatest weaknesses of this camera. In most cases the automatic setting is fine, but there are occasions when it would be useful to be able to override it.

• Three other sets of options are accessible using specific buttons on the back of the camera (these buttons double as the directional keys when using the menu system). These are flash, macro and timer settings.

• The camera is weatherproof, i.e. shouldn’t leak in the rain, as it has rubber seals inside the joints of the stainless steel case. It feels very robust, solid and well built, being of medium weight for its size. The sliding lens cover has a very positive action, and clicks into position nicely, giving the impression of a high quality product, which is what you’d expect from Olympus. The buttons are a little less positive in their action, but are well laid out and the menus and options are easy to learn and use.

• Finally, the camera is provided with good software and a USB 1.1 cable. The software allows some editing of images, renaming of files, production of albums etc, and printing in various formats, among other useful facilities. The software also stitches together the component photos of panoramas taken using the camera’s panorama facility.