If you’re looking for an ultracompact, take-anywhere digital camera but you don’t want to give up high-end image quality or features, the 4-megapixel Olympus Camedia D-40 Zoom is made for you. It takes very good pictures and boasts nearly every feature an advanced amateur shooter might want, all in a sleek body that’s about a third smaller than most of its competitors’.
Compact and uncluttered
Finished in brushed silver and dark gray, the D-40 looks good--if somewhat conventional. Though not as tiny as, say, a Canon Digital Elph, it fits in a shirt pocket, though rather conspicuously. It’s lightweight enough (8.4 ounces with battery and media installed) to schlepp around painlessly all day, particularly if you purchase the protective carrying case that attaches to your belt (not included). With the camera’s clamshell design, you simply slide the lens cover open to turn it on, and its 1.5-inch LCD delivers a sharp, smooth image.
The D-40 Zoom’s controls are reasonably well placed and easy to use, but the camera has fewer buttons and dials than you’ll find on most high-end models. That keeps its exterior simple and uncluttered, but it also means that you must use a multilevel menu system to access some important functions, such as resolution, white balance, and ISO settings. Fortunately, that menu system is logical and consistent, so it’s easy to learn. And you can customize it to make the settings you use frequently more accessible.
A shutterbug’s toolbox:
Apart from not accepting supplemental lenses or flashes, the D-40 offers a feature set that’s among the best available in a compact model. Olympus’s 2.8X zoom lens offers a bit less range than most 4-megapixel camera lenses, but that’s not a huge issue. Included in the impressive list of camera controls are such uncommon options as a spot-metered macro mode, a continuous-shooting mode that refocuses for each shot, a slow-sync flash mode with red-eye reduction, and a tool for fine-tuning white balance.
While the D-40’s operating speed isn’t especially impressive, it’s no laggard either. Shot-to-shot time is a bit faster than average--about one photo per second. We were pleased with the D-40’s frugal power consumption; we got more than 100 pictures out of a CR-V3 lithium battery pack with extensive flash and LCD use. The camera takes a range of AA batteries as well, which is a good capability to have on the road.
Photo finesse
Happily, the D-40’s pictures are as good as its design and feature set. The vast majority of our photos were well exposed and showed very good detail, with accurate and well-saturated colors, as well as natural skin tones both with and without the flash. We saw mild noise in the darker patches of some of our test images, and the purple fringing that all digital cameras produce where dark objects meet bright backgrounds was a bit worse than average with the D-40. But these are small quibbles; the camera’s overall picture quality is very good.
One aspect of the D-40 that has become a shortcoming is its use of SmartMedia removable memory to store images. Camera makers who previously supported this media format have switched to the new xD Picture Card. That means SmartMedia’s days are numbered, and its maximum capacity of 128MB isn’t likely to increase.
Now selling for a street price of about $600, the D-40 remains a good value, especially because it comes with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements image-editing software (which costs about $80 by itself) and a remote control. If you’re in the market for a very capable camera in a bantam-weight package, the D-40 should be on your shortlist. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore all your options before making a purchase. Pentax’s Optio 430 is an even smaller 4-megapixel model, and Canon’s PowerShot S40 and Ricoh’s Caplio RR1 are also alluring, compact 4-megapixel digicams. If you’d rather avoid SmartMedia, check out Olympus’s new C-50. It’s an ultracompact, 5-megapixel camera that uses the new xD Picture Card memory format.
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Chetan