The Camedia C-50 Zoom is compact for a 5megapixel camera and powers up into shooting mode when you slide back the brushed-metal lens cover.

While this may seem like a useful way of incorporating the lens cap into the body design of the device, it does take longer to shut down the camera.

The Camedia C-50 Zoom comes with a 32MB XD card capable of storing up to 13 images at 2, 560 x 1,920 resolution in SHQ format.

XD cards are available at up to 128MB, so the camera's storage capacity is limited.

A jog wheel at the back of the unit puts a range of shooting modes at your fingertips, including portrait, night scene and sports, as well as a number of manual shooting options, while dedicated buttons above the 1.5in LCD allow you to scroll through flash and macro settings.

The images produced were grainy and there was a large amount of noise evident in some shots. One explanation for this could be that the size of the CCD has been reduced to make it fit in such a small camera.

The pictures we took of a flower stall in auto shooting mode were very blurry in the corners and detail was lost on a bunch of burnt-out white chrysanthemums.

There was also a lack of differentiation between tones of hot pink on a bunch of carnations.

Although the Camedia C-50 Zoom has a rather disappointing macro range of 20-50cm, the images produced in macro mode were impressive.

The outline of the petals on a yellow gerbera were crisp and clean and the camera even picked out the individual hairs on the stalks.

DETAILS
Price: £549.99 (£468.08 ex VAT)
Contact: Olympus 0800 072 0800
www.olympus.com

SPECS