Despite all of the advances and changes in digital camera technology over the last few years, most digital cameras still sport a non-removable 3x lens. Usually offering a focal range of around 35-135mm (in 35mm equivalencies) these lenses provide a reasonable range from fairly wide to fairly telephoto. For the user who’s accustomed to a selection of interchangeable lenses, though, a 3x lens may seem fairly limited. If this sounds like you, then be sure to take a long look at the $1,200 Olympus C-2100 Ultra Zoom — a 2-megapixel camera with a 10x lens.
With a focal equivalency of 38 to 380mm, the C-2100 is targeted at digital camera users who want a more powerful lens, but don’t have $3,000 for a digital SLR such as the Canon D30 (or $2,000 for the Olympus Camedia E-10). The 2-megapixel C-2100 may seem a bit pricey, particularly when you consider that you can get a 3-megapixel camera for much less money. However, the camera provides excellent image quality and its optics are very impressive. If you’ve been shopping for a digital camera, the C-2100 is good enough that it might make your choice a little bit harder.
Something Familiar
If you’re familiar with Olympus’ other digital camera offerings, then the C-2100 will probably feel kind of familiar. Sharing design features of both the C-2020 and the C-2500, the C-2100 is a curious mix of Olympus’ point-and-shoot and SLR designs. The dominant feature of the camera is, of course, its long lens barrel. However, given its magnifying power, the camera’s lens is surprisingly small.
The camera’s body and controls are very similar to those of the C-2020. A 1.8-inch LCD display dominates the back of the unit and sits next to a four-way rocker switch and a few simple buttons for menu navigation and control.
The top of the camera features a nice LCD status display and a few simple buttons. For some reason, despite impressive engineering prowess, Olympus designers have trouble designing power switches. The C-2020, for example, sports a power switch that looks confusingly similar to a shutter release button. The C-2100, meanwhile, has a sliding power switch located directly below the shutter release. There’s nothing wrong with this design except that if you slide the power switch too far past the “on” position, you’ll hit the camera’s Reset function, which restores all settings to the factory defaults. The camera doesn’t ask for any confirmation before resetting, and a couple of times I got burned by this feature when, unbeknownst to me, the camera’s reset button had switched image quality back to its default of mid-level compression. Why this reset isn’t a menu-based function is a bit of a mystery.
The Olympus C-2100 builds on a strong, 10x zoom lens.
After its lens, the C-2100’s most interesting feature is its optical viewfinder. Though it looks like a typical SLR eyepiece viewfinder, it isn’t actually optical at all: Look into the viewfinder and you’ll see a tiny LCD screen like you’d find in the viewfinder of a video camera. At first I was wary of this electronic viewfinder, but eventually I was pleasantly surprised to find that it offers solutions to a number of common digital camera problems.
As is typical of most digital cameras, the LCD screen on the back of the C-2100 is unusable in direct sunlight. On most cameras, though, the optical viewfinders are usually of such poor quality and offer such reduced coverage of the scene that they’re hardly useful. The C-2100’s electronic solution offers a display identical to the rear-mounted LCD but without being impeded by sunlight. In addition, it also offers all of the same status and menu displays as the rear-mounted LCD, meaning you don’t have to take your eye away from your composition to check flash mode, exposure settings, or any other stats.
On the downside, the tiny screen’s resolution is too low to make out really fine details, and is definitely unusable for manual focusing. Though its resolution never compromised my ability to compose and take shots, the low resolution of the C-2100’s electronic viewfinder makes it disappointing when compared to a high-quality viewfinder on a nice SLR.
A button on the back of the camera switches between the large LCD panel and the electronic viewfinder. The switching is very speedy and any menus or status displays that are displayed on one screen will be duplicated on the other.
Finally, while it’s no substitute for a high-quality, optical through-the-lens (TTL) viewfinder, the C-2100’s electronic viewfinder is far superior to the optical mechanisms provided on most digital cameras. It’s hard to get used to using an LCD screen as a viewfinder, and with the C-2100, you don’t have to.
Storage and Power
As with the C-2500, the C-2100’s storage media is accessed through a door in the camera’s hand-grip. Unfortunately, unlike the versatile C-2500 — which supports both CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards — the C-2100 only provides support for SmartMedia. A single 8MB card is included with the camera. That card’s only enough for about 5 high-quality images, so you’ll probably want to buy another card right away.
A set of four NiMH batteries and a recharger are included with the camera. Batteries are loaded into the bottom of the handle, and last a long time. We had no problem getting over 100 shots out of a single charge.
Unlike the C-2500, the C-2100’s tripod mount is off-center (which can make for troubles when shooting panoramas) and is plastic rather than metal — surprising and somewhat disappointing to see on a camera this expensive.
A Whole Lotta Zoom
Olympus has done a very good job with the lens on the C-2100. The 38-to-380mm range provides more than ample telephoto power for the great majority of uses. If you’ve ever used a long telephoto lens, then you know how hard it is to hold a camera steady while framing a shot: Because you are zoomed in so far, even the tiniest motion can make it hard to accurately frame. To help compensate for these motions, the C-2100’s lens is optically stabilized. That is, as you make slight motions, the camera detects them and adjusts its optics to compensate, resulting in a smooth steady image. The C-2100’s mechanism works very well, though it does occasionally get confused and perform slight compensations even after you’ve stopped moving. These instances are rare and might only be a problem when shooting a QuickTime movie.
If you find yourself having doubts about the utility of the C-2100’s optical stabilization, all you need do is turn the feature off (a quick change of one menu setting) to see just how much it’s really helping. In theory, the optical stabilizer uses more battery power when it’s turned on, but if it does, it wasn’t obvious during testing.
The image on the left was taken with an Olympus C-2500L at its maximum 3x zoom, while the image on the right was taken with the C-2100 at 10x.
Click here for the full resolution 3x zoomed image, and here for the 10x zoomed image.
Ready! Aim!
Though you can spend a lot of time weighing the C-2100’s features and image quality, the thing you’ll probably notice the most when you first shoot with it is that it’s an incredibly fun camera. The well-designed controls and TTL viewfinder combined with the huge telephoto lens make for a camera that’s as user-friendly as it is versatile.
In addition to its fully automatic mode, the C-2100 provides shutter- and aperture-priority modes, as well as a completely manual mode. The camera offers a full range of apertures, from f2.8 to f8 at the widest focal length and f3.5 to f8 at the longest length. Shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/800 of a second are provided in shutter-priority mode, while full manual mode extends the longest speed to 16 seconds. Unfortunately, the camera offers no bulb mode.
Exposure compensation controls (offering the usual +/- 2 stops in 1/3-stop increments) are available in any mode by simply pressing the left and right buttons on the camera’s four-way dial. Controlling aperture or shutter speed when in a priority mode is just as simple: Just use the up and down buttons. This is Olympus’ best implementation yet for these standard features.
The camera gives you a choice of three metering modes — a matrix mode, a center-weight mode, and spot metering — and I was impressed with the metering in all three modes. Typical of Olympus, the camera tended to produce very contrasty images with dark shadows and saturated colors. Like the C-2500, the camera offers three levels of sharpening, which serve to increase or reduce not only the level of edge detail, but also the intensity of the camera’s colors.
…Fire!
Olympus buried the camera’s white balance and ISO settings within the menu system, but the company included a very nice exposure-lock button on the back of the camera. This feature allows you to lock exposure independently of focus — a necessary feature when shooting panoramas and a handy tool for difficult focusing situations.
And speaking of focus, the C-2100 offers a very dependable autofocus with a red autofocus assist lamp similar to the C-2500. It seems Olympus has permanently shaken off the autofocus troubles that plagued its early digital SLRs.
Olympus was one of the first digital camera vendors to offer cameras with extra memory buffers to facilitate quick shooting, and the C-2100 is a very speedy performer, indeed. The camera performs with no discernable shutter lag, and its ready to re-shoot almost immediately. Like most Olympus cameras, the C-2100’s status LCD offers a simple, clear readout of buffer capacity, making it simple to tell if you’re about to over-shoot the camera’s processing abilities. The camera’s Drive mode can shoot up to five frames at 2 frames per second. Several different drive modes are provided including an auto-bracketing feature that will automatically shoot 3 or 5 images with different exposure compensations.
In addition to automatic white balance, the 2100 offers presets for sunny days, cloudy weather, incandescent lighting, and fluorescent lighting. Unfortunately, the camera offers neither fine-tuning of these settings, nor a fully manual white balance control.
The C-2100 features a pop-up flash, a welcome improvement over the built-in flash of the C-2020 (and most other digital cameras). In addition to being farther away from the lens (and thus less prone to red-eye), the flash is more powerful than the C-2020’s smaller unit. Unfortunately, the C-2100 does not provide the C-2500’s hot shoe, opting instead for an external sync connection.
More Than Skin Deep
Olympus cameras have always produced very good — if not excellent — images, and the C-2100 is no exception. The camera’s color reproduction is admirable and the 10x lens produces very good detail. We detected only a slight barrel distortion at the wide end, and almost no pincushioning at the telephoto end.
From time to time, the camera produced a little bit of purple fringing — mostly at the more telephoto extreme of its zoom range — but not nearly as much as we’ve seen from other cameras.
The only real downside to the camera’s image quality is its 2-megapixel resolution. Though 2 megapixels is plenty for many applications, at $1,200 it’s hard not to pine for a nice 3-megapixel chip. However, Olympus has had a lot of time to refine and improve the results from its 2-megapixel sensors, and the additional work shows in the C-2100’s images, especially in low light.
Which Size Matters?
The Olympus C-2100 Ultra Zoom produces very good images and is great fun to use, but its price will probably complicate most people’s buying decision. After all, for a few hundred dollars less than the price of the C-2100, you can get an excellent 3-megapixel camera such as the Nikon Coolpix 990 or the Canon G1. On the other hand, the difference between 2- and 3-megapixel cameras is not as great as it may seem. The 25-percent increase in size is the difference between an 8-by-10-inch print and a 10-by-12-inch print.Then, too, neither the Coolpix nor the Canon G1 offer the huge zoom lens that makes the C-2100 so much fun to use.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 2, 2001
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