Olympus i:robe IR-500 Digital Camera

When I bought my Rebel XT (a digital SLR) a few months back, I gave away my point-and-shoot. That was a mistake, and I bought this camera as a "take-anywhere" supplement to the XT for when the XT is too awkward or overkill.

Image quality is a bit above average for this class of camera. It's 4 megapixel which in my opinion is the highest you can reasonably go with lens systems this small. If you are looking at other similar cameras with internal zoom lens systems (such as the Nikon Coolpix S3 or the Pentax Optio WP series), bear in mind that although those cameras have higher resolution sensors, their lenses don't have the resolving power to do them justice, so evaluate them on the assumption that you will need to shrink the image to 4 megapixel or less to get good pixel-level quality. The extra pixels (and the memory the images take up) are a waste. In the IR-500, it's just about right.

This camera's unusual folding-screen design looks a little dull and boring when closed and just plain odd when open, but it actually works quite well. The screen is large, bright and detailed. Holding it when open is relatively easy. Dropping it in a pocket when closed is easy too, since the lens and screen are both fully covered and thus won't be scratched or broken. It's not waterproof, but it does offer much greater protection than most cameras.

Actually opening the camera can be a little fiddly sometimes if you don't grab it in the right place, since there is no obvious tab or lever to use. Still, you get used to it quickly.

Features and scene modes are typical for this class. Scene modes lock out some functions (like setting flash mode or white balance) in an annoying way sometimes, so you need to switch to P-AUTO to get them back. They don't seem to add much to the images, I found the P-AUTO usually did pretty much the same job.

Other comments about red-eye are true. Red-eye is difficult to avoid when using flash. However, removing red-eye later is easy with common software, so is hardly worthy of criticism nowadays.

Movie mode will do 30fps at 320x240 or 15fps at 640x480 or 800x600. 15fps isn't as jerky as I've seen on other cameras, I was quite impressed. Storage use at 640x480 is just a little less than 1M per second, or around 20 minutes on a 1G card. xD memory is cheaper than it used to be, so no worries there. A couple of interesting movie features: capturing still frames from movies and generating "index prints" of movies.

You *do* need the dock to charge or download images. In the case where you take it out for day trips this is perfect, since you just drop it in the cradle when you get home, download everything, and when the software is done the camera goes to sleep automatically and charges. I can imagine it being a little annoying when travelling. However, the dock is light and sturdy and the charger adapter is fairly small, so it won't be that hard to take it in a backpack.

Olympus' auto-connect works fine without new drivers or software on Windows or Mac OS X, and also works perfectly on Linux (which I use).

Haven't had it long enough to comment on battery life.

I bought this when on sale at Henrys in Canada for C$200, at that price it's a great deal.