5. Speed And Battery Life

Notable differences come to light when one operates the four cameras in daily use. Once again, Fuji comes out top, with a start-up time of around two seconds, whereas the C-60 takes three seconds and the Kodak four seconds. The times for taking the shot are more or less equivalent (around one second), while this also depends on how you shoot and the focal length. Fuji retains its lead when it comes to the time it takes to save images to memory, with two seconds to save as a JPEG (with maximum quality) or as a RAW image (with F710 only). It takes Olympus three seconds and a whopping seven seconds for the Kodak DX7630, which comes last by a mile and loses quite a few points as a result of this poor performance parameter. As has been said, the C-60 only takes four seconds to save in TIFF format, an astonishing time when you think of the size of TIFF - six megapixels: 17 MB.

As far as battery life goes, the days when it took a nuclear power plant to supply power to a digital camera are long gone, and no one will be sorry. Our four cameras all use Lithium-ion batteries that can happily cope with around 200 images (flash strength and immediate image display). You won't need to carry chargers and back-up batteries if you are going away for the weekend. On this point, all three manufacturers deserve our kudos.

Image Quality

Image quality, by our definition, means the rendering of details, sharpness, consistency of contrasts and colors, exposure and enlargement possibilities. In this respect, it is hard to strictly judge, but the final results are fairly eloquent for all four cameras.

The two Fuji models and the Olympus are much better than the Kodak at every level, especially in sharpness. The C-60 produces excellent results, but regularly gets the exposure wrong, producing results that are sometimes problematic.

The most reliable cameras producing the most uniform results are the Fuji F610 and F710. The warm tones of the colors and optimal color saturation were particularly appreciated (a fraction too saturated, perhaps, but it's a matter of taste).

All four cameras can produce A3 prints without a problem, which is good news in itself. In passing, we found that the F710 produces images that are just as good (maybe even better) than the Olympus C-60, which says something for the SuperCCD technology. This having been said, it must be repeated that results do not depend solely on the sensor. The noise, for example, still poses problems, although of the minor variety.