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From cutting edge to legacy in two months.
Going our separate ways, again, brother George recently purchased Nikon's
Coolpix 950 (see last month's review) while I opted for the more traditional Olympus design. Take a gander at painfully
detailed reviews of his and mine. (Within weeks of making my purchase Olympus came out with the C-2500 SLR.)
 Both 2+ megapixel cameras produce products with enough quality and detail to generate 8X10 glossy
prints rivaling film. I think the Nikon produces sharper images with better color, though George disagrees. And
both devour batteries the way a Ford Excursion goes through gas.
Where they differ, other than appearance, is in flexibility. The Nikon has
more choices than a cable box while the Olympus gets by with fewer, but marginally easier to decipher, settings.
In either case, if you can't program your VCR, frustration awaits.
The Olympus site celebrates its many features, so lets look at the untold
story.
1) Whatever you do get NiMH rechargeable batteries. My original alkalines
went dry in less than a day.
2) Be prepared to catch the lens cap which pops off each time you power up,
landing in some inaccessible locale.
3) While you can set a number of defaults, other important functions, such
as spot metering, reset when the camera goes off.
4) Brace yourself to decipher the multilingual manual. For example, "Record
mode," referred to many times, is never defined (it's any setting from which you can take a picture).
5) SmartMedia memory cards don't come in large sizes and may or may not become
a standard (Nikon employs the more popular CompactFlash card).
6) A Rube Goldberg option called the FlashPath floppy disk adapter that allows
you do download pictures through your floppy drive caused one of my computers to crash religiously while it gets
stuck in another's drive.
7) There is no USB connector! Downloading is tediously slow.
 So
what is good?
1) The built-in flash is great! Using only flash I've shot portraits as close
as 4' with spectacular exposure results.
2) Panoramic shots are easy to make because some rocket scientist added a
grid to the LCD viewer allowing you to overlap frames accurately. The included stitching software ain't half bad.
3) For all but one setting the files generated are JPEG, making them a snap
to manipulate with virtually all graphics programs. There is a TIFF option but it takes up 5-6 MB of space per
shot.
4) It just squeezes into your jeans pocket (if you don't mind those "…or
are you just glad to see me?" comments).
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