When you’re about to purchase a new camera would you consider buying a film camera? I’m sure many of you would answer that question with a resounding ‘no’. Digital cameras have, for quite some time now, surpassed sales of film cameras to such an extent that a lot of camera stores don’t even carry film cameras anymore. Granted, digital cameras are much easier to use, don’t need film processing and you can immediately see whether the photo you just took is indeed in focus. However many of the popular digital cameras sporting a 2 to 3 megapixel image sensor will do fine with 4 x 6 printouts, but when you want to blow up your photos they often lack the resolution to retain the image sharpness, something which wasn’t the case with most film cameras.
A look at the Olympus C8080 Wide Zoom, and the media card bay.
So obviously you’ll need a higher resolution camera, 5, 6 or even 8 megapixel to be able to blow up your photos without losing image sharpness. It just so happens that 8 megapixel cameras have been introduced a few months ago by all major manufacturers so we were able to look at all of them. Today we’ll look at our favorite, the Olympus C8080 Wide Zoom, as we think this camera is the best 8 megapixel camera currently available. We arrive at this conclusion by looking at the quality of build, the responsiveness, ease of use and of course image quality. But before we tell you exactly how we arrive at that conclusion in the second paragraph, let’s first take a closer look at what Olympus’s 8 megapixel digital camera has to offer.
The pop-up flash is operated manually and triggered in low-light conditions.
Many of the 8 megapixel cameras on sale today are based on a refresh of an older design; they for example use basically the same lens and body as previous generation 5 megapixel cameras and just update the image sensor. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if the lens has enough resolution this could work very well. Olympus however chose a different approach. They looked at the part that is at the hart of every camera, and that’s the lens. By designing the camera around a new high resolution, high quality, large aperture, wide zoom lens, without making big zoom numbers a priority, the Olympus lens is simply the best of the current crop of 8 megapixel cameras.
