The Review
We haven't had a chance to fully test this product yet, but we've assembled this helpful overview of relevant information on it.
Check out the Olympus Stylus 7040 point and shoot camera. It comes with a 14 megapixel resolution.
Olympus continues its Stylus series with the 7040 point and shoot camera. It has a 14 megapixel resolution with a CCD sensor. It comes with a 7x optical zoom. There is an aperture range of F/3.0 – 5.9 and an ISO range of 100 to 1600. It has a 3 inch display. The camera is SD card compatible. It comes with creative art filters to create artistic photos before you take them. It also records in 720p with sound.
Features List:
- 14 megapixels
- CCD sensor
- 7x optical zoom
- Aperture F/3.0 – 5.9
- ISO 100 – 1600
- 3 inch display
- SD card compatible
- Creative art filters
- HD 720p video recording
Digital Trends’ digital camera buying tips:
Don’t Buy Til You Try
One final bit of advice. Never, ever buy a camera purely on its specs or a few positive reviews. What looks good on paper, and what feels good to one person, isn’t necessarily going to be the perfect camera for you. Patronize shops that allow you to spend a lot of hands-on time with your prospective models. Cameras are extremely touchy-feely products, and the truth is that most of them include similar feature sets and take decent pictures. But they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and you’ll be spending many hours with one of them in your hands. Long-term comfort is perhaps the most important factor of all.
What about shooting video?
Within the past few years, video has gone from a novel sideshow that yielded almost unusably bad results, to a legitimate secondary purpose for many point-and-shoot cameras. Although you probablt won’t want to replace your dedicated camcorder with a camera that also shoots video, many will do the job just fine for short, impromptu clips.
First off, pay attention to the resolution a camera can capture – VGA (640 x 480) is now common on point-and-shoot cams, while 720p is getting more frequent and 1080p sometimes crops up on DSLRs. Video in the AVCHD format – the same type real digital camcorders shoot – is preferable to other formats. Pay attention to the encoding bitrate, measured in megabits per second (mbps). The higher the rate, the more detailed the videos will look, although they will take up more space on your storage card as well.
Memory card buying tips
Name Brand: Buying a name brand memory card can sometimes cost an extra few dollars, but along with the name comes a trustworthy company, a good warranty, a generous exchange policy and a reputation for stability – something that’s much more critical than it sounds.
Speed: Not all Flash Memory cards are created equal. Some are terribly slow and others are turbo charged for high-end digital photography. True high-speed Flash Memory cards will have their speed ratings prominently displayed, whether on the card itself, the product packaging or both. You’ll see ratings like 80X, 133X, 266X, or perhaps 8MB/second, 20MB/second or 40MB/second. If you don’t see this number, inquire with a sales rep. If they don’t know or if the manufacturer hides this info, don’t buy the card. Look for a card that has at least a 9MB/second or 60X rating. Why is this speed important? If you’re taking numerous photos in succession, you don’t want the camera to stop taking photos so it can slooowwly save the images to the memory card.
Storage capacity: There are many factors that affect how many photos you can store on a single card – how many “megapixels” the camera is rated for, whether you’ve selected highest-quality photo settings or if you’ve set your camera to take slightly smaller photos. For example, an 8 megapixel Canon point-and-shoot camera can fit around 2,200 high-quality photos on an 8GB Secure Digital card. By this standard, even a 1GB memory card could hold up to 275 high quality photos. A whopping 16GB card could hold nearly 4,400 pics! That’s a lot!
Flexibility and Options: SLR or Point-n-Shoot?
Lens Flexibility: Point-and-shoot cameras offer a wide variety of zoom lenses from the basic 3x up to 26x. If you’re thinking compact, you have many options, but we recommend starting out with a basic wide-angle view (28mm or so) then multiplying that to your heart’s content. A 24x model like the Nikon Coolpix P90 even offers 28-624mm options so you can take nice group shots and zoom into subjects you can barely recognize. There are many small cameras with wide focal ranges that are easily toted around-a huge plus for point-and-shoots.
Contrastingly, DSLRs are far from compact and typically are supplied with a 3x kit lens. From there you can go crazy, spending a small fortune on interchangeable lenses. Canon and Nikon, the two biggest DSLR sellers by far, each have over 65 to choose from. And these lenses use finer glass than point-and-shoots, adding to overall quality advantage of DSLRs. The downside is that they are much heavier, bulkier and require at least a backpack to lug everything around. Still, for the professional or prosumer, DSLR is the natural fit.
Options: Most point-and-shoot digital cameras offer limited manual options for adjusting aperture (f/stops) and shutter speeds. Granted, the vast majority of amateur paparazzi out there couldn’t care less about this small range of potential adjustments, and will be perfectly happy firing away in Auto mode. But while DSLRs have Auto settings too, they also let you unleash your inner Annie Leibovitz by adjusting depth of field, blurring subjects and going wherever the creative muse takes you. If you’re looking to get more creative with photos, a DSLR is the right choice.
What Should I look for in an LCD Display?
Camera manufacturers market display size quite prominently because it’s easy to visualize, but other factors also come into play. Resolution (usually measured in the number of pixels, like 461K) will determine how clear the display looks, and brightness will help determine whether it gets washed out when shooting outdoors. An optical viewfinder makes a great backup when shooting with a less-than-ideal LCD.
LCD screens are measured diagonally and 2.5 inches is a common size. We prefer even larger ones, up to 3 inches. If your eyesight is a bit challenged, definitely look for a larger LCD. Screens are measured in pixels, just like image size. Again, the more pixels, the better the image you’ll see on screen.
