Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom

The Olympus C7070 Wide Zoom saves images on either CompactFlash Type I or II cards, or xD-Picture Cards. The memory card compartment offers slots accommodating both card types. The camera ships with a 32MB xD Picture Card, not remotely adequate for a camera with the resolution of the C7070 Zoom, but xD Picture Cards are currently available as large as 512MB size (and 1GB cards have been announced), and CF cards can be found as large as 8GB. The CF / xD button on the camera's rear panel selects which memory card to use, and an option on the camera's playback menu lets you copy images between cards. The C7070 Wide Zoom does offer individual image protection via the Metering / Protect button, but as usual this doesn't protect against erasure due to card reformatting. It must also be noted that the camera's Panorama function is only available when an Olympus-brand xD-Picture Card is in use, a policy that I've long questioned the wisdom of.

A happy note though, is that the Olympus C7070 does support the FAT32 directory format, so you can use memory cards larger than 2 GB in it. (I tested it with a Lexar 4GB memory card, and it read, wrote, and formatted the card properly.)

The C7070 Wide Zoom can store images in RAW, uncompressed TIFF, and compressed JPEG file formats. The TIFF setting can be assigned to any one of nine resolutions through the camera's Mode Setup menu. (I never could figure out why Olympus thinks we need as many as nine different options for image size, 3 or 4 would be more than enough, in my thinking.) JPEG compression levels include Super High Quality (SHQ), High Quality (HQ), and Standard Quality (SQ1 & SQ2). The myriad size options can be assigned to the camera's TIFF, SHQ, HQ, SQ1, and SQ2 quality levels via the Shooting menu, as shown in the table below. (Green table cells indicate image size options that can be assigned to each named quality setting.) Whatever image size/quality options are assigned to the five named quality settings can be quickly selected either by the "shortcut button" (see the earlier description of the user interface) or via the record setup menu. RAW format is only available for full-resolution images, but the camera can be set to also capture an SHQ, HQ, SQ1 or SQ2 JPEG image simultaneously with each RAW file.

The table below shows all the available size/quality options (there ought to be enough here to satisfy anyone), the number of each that can be stored on the included 32MB memory card, and the amount of image compression employed for each.

The Olympus C7070 Wide Zoom comes with interface software and cables for both Macintosh and Windows computers. It employs a USB Auto-Connect interface for high-speed computer connection. Like all of Olympus' recent digital cameras, the C7070 is a USB "storage class" device, meaning it will connect directly to computers running the Windows XP or Mac OS X operating systems. In our tests, the C7070 was fast but not blazingly so, with a download speed of 860 KBytes/second, when transferring files from a Lexar 80x CF card. (Cameras with slow USB interfaces run as low as 300 KB/s, cameras with fast v1.1 interfaces run as high as 600 KB/s. Cameras with USB v2.0 interfaces run as fast as several megabytes/second.)

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