Olympus D-490 Zoom Digital Camera

Olympus D-490 Zoom Digital Camera

The D-490 Zoom digital camera makes filmless photography easy even for lawyers who need to take pictures without taking a crash course in photography.

Olympus has delivered a camera that echoes the footprint of its widely used and highly portable Stylus clamshell film camera and its predecessor, the D-460 Zoom filmless camera.

The D-490 Zoom introduces an innovative and versatile approach to capturing digital images with a resolution of up to 2.1 million pixels that are instantaneously viewable on an integrated 1.8-inch square color LCD (liquid crystal display) screen located on the back of the camera.

This resolution is excellent for Web photos or for sending attached image files to colleagues, clients or opposing counsel. Printing on photographic-quality paper creates fine pictures at up to 8-by-11 inches; otherwise, the picture is too grainy and loses definition.

The camera is especially useful because you can frame your shot by viewing it on the LCD screen instead of looking through the tiny conventional viewfinder.

Then, after you take the shot, you can view it on screen to determine if you want to reshoot the picture.

The screen allows you to view the last shot taken or other shots before that. This feature alone justifies a purchase of a digital camera.

Features and options in this camera easily can be changed through a convenient circular jog-dial, which is configured with four arrows to enable stepwise movement in an up-or-down or forward-or-backward direction, much like a remote control.

The jog-dial has a slight learning curve, but it actually becomes quite intuitive and easy in short order. After triggering operation of the menu by pressing the menu button on the camera back, an icon-flavored main menu is displayed on the LCD.
The D-490 Zoom is great for taking both telephoto and wide-angle snapshots. While flash is integrated into the camera, its power is somewhat limited for distance shots. Indeed, the maximum distance for taking shots with the telephoto lens is only 8 feet; many telephoto shots have subjects farther away than 8 feet.
Flash shots taken with the wide-angle lens, on the other hand, will have sufficient lighting up to 13 feet. A macro lens option is also available for photographing images as close as 8 to
31 inches.
Another superb feature of the camera is it accommodates almost any lighting condition.
The camera does this automatically, or the user can adjust the camera for lighting conditions, eliminating the chore of inserting different speed film for different lighting conditions.
Additionally, the camera enables you to shoot individual still pictures and provides for action-sequence and panoramic shots.
Surprisingly, the camera also has an impressive motion-picture mode. In sequence mode, up to 45 snapshots are automatically taken.

The D-490 Zoom’s novel DRAM capability allows snapshots to be stored in a memory buffer while another shot is being taken and kicks in with a powerful burst mode so frame rates of up to 1.3 shots per second are achieved. Great power is delivered in a rather small package.

An Olympus 8 MB SmartMedia removable card, storing up to 82 snapshots, is included with the camera. Also available are 4, 16 and 32 MB SmartMedia removable cards.

This versatile storage capability is another distinguishing feature. While these images may be easily edited using Camedia Master (the photo-editing software included), more sophisticated editing may be achieved using professional image-editing software such as Corel PhotoPaint or Adobe Photoshop.

The camera also allows you to view your photos on other media, such as television or a videotape, which is helpful to show demonstrative evidence in trial court.

As a 2.1 megapixel camera, the Olympus D-490 Zoom can record images with modest resolution (640-by-480 pixels) or high resolution (1,600-by-1,200 pixels).

Accordingly, in addition to images being communicated via the Web or e-mail attachments, such high-quality images may be enlarged to as much as 8-by-11 inches without losing definition or introducing excessive grain.

Attorneys already apply digitally taken snapshots to accident scenes, situations involving client injuries or damage to property, and to record peculiar document-discovery scenarios.
Intellectual property attorneys have discovered the convenience of filing trademark applications electronically using attached image files depicting how trademarks are used in commerce.

Attorneys, legal professionals or firms improving their practice with digital cameras definitely should give the Olympus D-490 Zoom a shot or at least a snapshot.

Olympus America Inc.
(800) 622-6372
www.olympus.com/digital

$499 street price

Reviewed by Al Harrison, intellectual property lawyer at Harrison & Egbert in Houston.

Feb/Mar '01 Issue

PROS
Simple to use. Saves time looking up words in a legal dictionary. Customer service delivered quality support.

CONS
Original installation disks were bad, but customer service immediately e-mailed then mailed replacement software.

VERDICT
Spellex Legal 7.0 is a great high-quality program and is an affordable legal spell checker.