Olympus D-510 Zoom

Great body design; high-quality, fast, wide, 18x optical zoom lens; sensor-shift image stabilization; manual exposure controls; RAW image capture.

Very slow; high noise above ISO 400; slightly soft images.

Olympus' SP-550UZ has great ergonomics, but disappointingly slow performance and soft, noisy images drag it down.

Wide zoom range; solid image quality; reasonably broad set of shooting features.

Occasionally sluggish zoom response; no sound capture; nonrechargeable batteries yield the fastest performance.

A 10X zoom lens adds some kick to an otherwise average camera.

Wide zoom range; sharp photos; broad feature set.

Occasionally sluggish zoom response.

The 10X zoom lens adds some kick to an otherwise average 4-megapixel camera.

Biggest optical zoom available on a 3-megapixel camera; tons of features; takes both old SmartMedia cards and new xD-Picture cards.

Unstabilized lens is susceptible to camera shake; many features buried in LCD menus.

A solidly designed, relatively compact camera whose claim to fame is a 10X zoom lens.

Uses regular AA batteries; offers both USB and video outputs; includes spot metering.

Images are on the soft side; relatively slow; fair to poor battery life; CCD artifacts in low-light shots; purple fringing galore.

Lackluster image quality and shoddy performance mar what is otherwise an easy-to-operate camera with a decent feature set.

Generous feature set and software package at an affordable price; customizable My Mode; sharp, bright LCD.

Optical viewfinder not exactly WYSIWYG; no external flash or video-out connections; doesn't record sound with video clips.

Olympus's Camedia C-3020 delivers more features than you'd expect for its affordable price.