Just a few updates. LetsGoDigital has some very nice pictures of the camera.

Taking pictures at the party yesterday mostly worked fine. I did confuse the power button with the shutter button twice, and sometimes the flash-precharge time seemed overly long; also, the LCD display blanks out for a second while the flash fires. One image was very blurry – I think inadvertently turned the flash off, so the camera shifted to a longer exposure time. The rest were mostly fine, if not too sharp, and a little darker than I normally like. I tried out the movie clip feature but the room was too dark for that. I took some pictures under incandescent lights but the auto white balance didn’t work too well.

Afterwards, downloading the pictures to our host’s Windows XP laptop worked fine with no additional installation. Coincidentally, he’d just gotten a Olympus C-4000; it was striking to compare them side-by-side, the Olympus looks big and clunky. At maximum resolution, the Olympus takes a 2288×1712-pixel picture compared to the Optio’s 2048×1536. Other features are roughly equivalent, but the Olympus weighs 400g compared to the Optio’s 115g!

Reading the manual I discovered other goodies. The movie clip mode takes a maximum of about 370 frames (30 secs at 12.33 fps). However, one can divide the frame rate by 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 to make time-lapse movies; at the last rate, this means 50 minutes are compressed into 30 seconds. This should be fun; I’ll have to find my old pocket tripod for testing this. Images can be cropped to a smaller size inside the camera, copied between the internal memory and the SD card, and b&w, sepia, and colored filters can be applied.

As soon as possible, I plan to buy a spare battery, the AC adapter and a case for the camera; none of these were available at the store when I ordered it, unfortunately.