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A few months ago, Olympus sent me a C-5060 Wide Zoom digital camera. I immediately took it on a three day mountain bike road trip that included several serious rides. I expected the camera to be compact, light, and built well enough to make a good biking camera. And I was hoping the new, wide-angle lens would make photos possible that I usually need an SLR to capture. I wasn't disappointed.
The Olympus C-5060 comes from a long line of high-end compact digital cameras that the Olympus engineers have been refining for many years. It quite possibly has the best design and user interface of any compact digital camera. All of the controls on the 5060 are easy to find and placed logically, and the deep menus provide pretty much any option anyone could want or need. One of the things I like the most about the 5060 (and other Olympus digital cameras) is the ability to program personal start-up settings, including aperture, shutter speed, focal length, flash mode, etc. This allows me to get to work quickly without missing any shots.
The 5060 has a lot of great features. But for me, the wide-angle lens sets it apart. I've been frustrated by the lack of a really wide focal length on compact digital cameras I've used. The wide end of the 5060 is comparable to a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera. I'd actually like an even wider lens. But for a built-in zoom on a compact camera, I'm very happy with the wide end of the 5.7-22.8mm lens. I didn't notice any optical problems and the wider angle-of-view allowed me to get photos I wouldn't have been able to take with other compact digital cameras.
Shutter-lag was noticeable, but not too bad by compact digital camera standards. I'd like to see another version of this camera with the new, TruePic Turbo image processor Olympus just introduced. Shutter-lag is still one of the biggest limitations with most compact digitals, although that's beginning to change. I struggled a little at first, timing mountain bike photos. But after I got used to the shutter-lag I got some great ones. You can get good pictures with pretty much any camera as long as you get to know the camera and work within its limitations.
As with its predecessors, the 3030, 3040, 5050, etc, the C-5060 is built exceptionally well. It's got an all-metal body and feels very solid. It doesn't have even a hint of the "plasticky" feel so many other compact digital cameras have. The new, multi-position LCD is a nice addition for macro photography or any situation where it?s hard to see through a normal viewfinder. And as with past models, there's a flash hot shoe so that you can add an Olympus dedicated flash, if you need more flash power.
The 5060 has one very important feature that I'm starting to look for in digital cameras - a live histogram. It's the first camera I've used that has this innovative feature. A lot of photographers have learned to use histograms to check exposures after taking a picture. But a live histogram allows you to check your exposure in real-time. It effectively replaces the traditional light meter display with a more powerful and accurate representation of exposure data. Basically, you use the histogram to make sure you aren't "clipping" any detail in the shadows or the highlights. You adjust your exposure, moving the histogram to the left (darker) or right (lighter), making sure you don't push the graph off the end of the display. And when the histogram indicates the exposure is correct, you take the picture.
This camera has a great lineage. I had a lot of faith in it before I ever laid my hands on it. When you buy the 5060, you're not buying a brand new, unproven camera. This camera is the result of constant refinement over the past few years. The wide-angle lens sets it apart from other cameras in its class and the image quality is very good. It has pretty much every feature you'd want or expect from a camera and then some. It's a solid photographic instrument and I really enjoyed using it.
I shot studio test images with the Olympus C-5060 at all ISO settings. The links below will take you to corresponding gallery pages where you can view the full-sized JPEG files. Metering was done in manual exposure mode using the camera's histogram to ensure that there was no highlight clipping. All controls (sharpness, contrast, saturation, etc.) were left at their default settings and the images were shot as high-quality JPEGs then resaved with minimal compression in Photoshop CS. No editing was done aside from adding the gray bar, text, and logos.
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