Olympus SP-800UZ

What captured my attention to this camera had been the huge zoom in such a tiny frame (lens excepted, just a little bigger than a pocket P&S), a singular achievement compare to the recent and announced super zooms. Testing it I've discovered other qualities but also drawbacks. The zoom was rewarding, but of course some rules had to be obeyed at its maximum. The Fine Zoom gives you a plus in performance at the price of the image size (8M maximum). I liked the menu also (mainly the classical selection wheel transfered within the display). I'd liked to mention some other nice features (photo "paraphernalia" if you wish) like the auto-mode panorama and the drawing mode. At the beginning I've been rather upset by the absence of the manual mode (the lack of the viewfinder had not been a problem for me); then I've discovered I could emulate the desired configurations by the settings in the menu, admittedly a more complicated way. When shooting movies you have to decide if you want to use the optical zoom variation and no sound recording, or to choose the sound and the digital zoom variation only. I think this is because the zooming in being rather noisy. As drawbacks besides the ones in the list I'd like to mention the battery charging through the camera, so blocking any activity during the action. I'm advising for a spare and a charger. All in all I believe it is an interesting and rewarding camera, but don't buy it if you're not ready to make some effort to learn a new operating way.

The SP-800UZ is one of the most versatile cameras on the market today thanks to the 30x wide optical zoom lens. Combining the lens with its other features, performance and image quality make this an excellent ultra-zoom option.

Front Looking at this fearsome lens from the front, it's important to remember that the camera body is only 4.2 inches wide. The three holes to the lower left of the lens cover the speaker, the two to the upper right of the lens shield the mono mic.

The smallest digital camera with 30X optical zoom also records HD video and a 14 megapixels sensor.

The Olympus SP-800UZ doesn't lack anything in zoom power.

The Olympus SP-800UZ is a 14-megapixel superzoom camera with a whopping 30x zoom range, which measures to the equivalent of 28-840mm on a 35mm camera. With a feature set that matches up against the likes of the Nikon P100 and Fuji HS10, the Olympus...

Now that cameras such as this are nearly commonplace, the decision whether to buy a digicam that shoots HD movies as well as pretty big stills or a camcorder that shoots HD video and stills is a tricky one. Pricewise, it's also a close race.

The Olympus SP-800UZ is based around a 1/2.3"-type CCD image sensor with an effective resolution of fourteen megapixels, coupled to a 30x optical zoom lens. Images have dimensions of 4,288 x 3,216 pixels or below. The Olympus SP800UZ's lens offers...