Olympus C-840L review

Plenty of gadgets seem to fill a 'mine's better than yours' role, but there are few as genuinely useful as digital cameras.

However, there are digital cameras and then there are digital dogs.

The difference can be like comparing a toy to the real thing. In posher digital cameras the image is captured by a charge coupled device (CCD). This consists of an array of light-sensitive elements, in which each pixel is represented by a red, blue and green transistor.

Cheaper cameras using CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensors have emerged as an alternative to CCDs. These require less power than CCDs but they can also produce mucky images and are poor at capturing moving subjects.

The Olympus C-840L is a CCD camera capable of an excellent image resolution of 1,290x960 - that's close to 1.3 million pixels, as it says on the box. At this resolution you can take and store around nine top-quality images on the camera. If you want to get more pictures into the camera you can cut down the resolution. At 640x480 pixels, you can cram around 60 shots into the camera.

Downloading your images onto a PC is a cinch. A lead and software are provided specially for the purpose. There's also an optional floppy disk adaptor. You use this by removing the special SmartMedia card from the camera (easily done) and fitting it into a pretend floppy disk, then inserting this into the PC. Extra SmartMedia cards are also available, up to 8Mb (£60, and twice the standard size).

The camera itself is a neat design. It's a pleasure to hold and is well-endowed with features such as a fancy flash for red-eye reduction, the ability to shoot up to 10 continuous shots at half-second intervals and a zoom facility - produced in the software rather than with the 5.5mm Olympus lens.

If you want top-quality prints and have access to top-quality printing, the C-840L is a worthwhile step up from lesser competitors.