Olympus Brand is Waning
Strengths: Excellent battery life and very good manual controls.
Weaknesses: Poor image quality and poor Olympus customer service.
Summary: Over three decades ago I started my photography hobby with several Olympus SLR cameras (OM-1, OM-2, OM-10). I loved the Olympus brand for the durable, compact design. Now, after two months of owning a C-7070, I conclude with regrets that the brand has waned considerably.
Pros:
The C series is reasonably compact. The overall construction is high quality and durable (except for the media card system).
The manual controls are prolific. There are lots of specialized buttons everywhere on the outside case in addition to via the usual menu control.
Image resolution of 7 mega-pixels is empowering and allows substantial post production cropping.
Battery life is excellent. I regularly was able to shoot 250 very high resolution pictures (one down from raw) without recharging.
Cons:
The lens is very atypical. When zoomed out to the widest setting, it exhibits notable barrel distortion. When zoomed in to the maximum setting, it still does not equate to the "standard angle of view".
Image quality is below the brand. Color saturation is low in typical daylight settings and white balance is off.
The media bay has a flimsy plastic cover that opens too easily.
My first experience with customer service was a call to report the LCD display was flashing random zones in each picture. I was told that was not normal and to send it in for service. I later discovered via the Internet, not their manuals, this is a normal operation and is a variation on a histogram feature. The zones are shaded flashing blue or red to indicate over or under exposure.
My second request for customer service is still in progress. After only 5 swaps of a premium brand compact flash card, a couple of the pins bent. I returned to Olympus for service and they have initially denied the warranty and estimated repairs at $207. There is nothing I should be able to do to damage the camera internals and with so little time on the camera this should be under warranty.
Alas, there is a reason Nikon and Canon are now ahead of Olympus in the digital camera market.

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