Usually when people ask me to suggest the best digital still camera they could buy, it was a fairly simple question to answer until quite recently. Despite its ageing design - old in electronic device years anyway - the Olympus Camedia C1400-XL was difficult to beat. Olympus combined a good CCD with great glass on its lens and excellent image-processing, a combination that hit all the bases which is rare in digital cameras.
Other companies tried to push the envelope a bit farther but did not really succeed until the new crop of two-megapixel CCDs were released.
The Olympus Camedia 2000z is the company's first effort at a two-megapixel camera. Many people I spoke to complained about the bulk of the Olympus C1400-XL. The camera is deceptively larger than in the advertisements. However when you are used to a 35mm camera, you cannot expect it to be too small.
So when I opened the box for the 2000z, I was expecting a similarly bulky camera. What I found was a camera about half the size of its predecessor. Olympus has obviously heard those complaints and taken them to heart.
The 2000z requires four AA batteries and an internal SmartMedia card slot. Like many new cameras, the 2000z allows users to shoot and store images in both Jpeg and Tiff formats. As Tiff uses no image compression, it should yield much cleaner images. Unfortunately, for a camera that shoots 5.5-megabyte images, Olympus has seen fit to include only a 4 MB card. I was thus unable to test the camera's Tiff mode.
In the field I had one major complaint about the camera's design. On the top deck, there is a power button with a wide collar around the circumference. Rotating the collar changes the camera's mode. There are three shooting modes which allow various levels of manual control, a playback mode which allows images to be displayed on the camera's LCD panel and a setup/download mode.