The Olympus C-740UZ is a digital camera

Digital photography

Digital photography is a form of photography that uses an array of light sensitive sensors to capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on light sensitive film...

 manufactured

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labor to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale...

 by Olympus

Olympus Corporation

is a Japan-based manufacturer of optics and reprography products. Olympus was established on 12 October 1919, initially specializing in microscope and thermometer businesses. Its global headquarters are in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, while its USA operations are based in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,...

. It was first released in 2003.

Features and lens

The UZ in the camera's name refers to Ultra Zoom

Ultra Zoom

Ultra Zoom is a series of digital cameras by Olympus. It may refer to:* Olympus C-2100 Ultra Zoom * Olympus C-700UZ * Olympus C-720 Ultra Zoom* Olympus C-730UZ* Olympus C-740UZ * Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom...

; 10 times zoom being a significant increase over the more standard three times zoom capability of standard digital cameras.
The lens is an Olympus aspherical glass zoom lens 6.3 – 63mm (37.9-379mm equivalent for 35mm format). The 10x zoom is equivalent to 38-380mm in 35mm photography. The specifications describe it as 11 lenses in 7 groups.

Movies

Movies can be recorded without sound and the recording time is dependent on the xD card

XD-Picture Card

xD-Picture Card is a flash memory card format, used mainly in older digital cameras. xD stands for Extreme Digital.xD cards are available in capacities of 16 MiB up to 2 GiB.- History :...

 capacity. They are in Quicktime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 ( .mov) format.

Power source

The camera can use AA batteries (4) including rechargeable batteries. Alternatively it can take two CR-V3

CR-V3

A CR-V3 battery is a type of disposable high-capacity 3-Volt battery used in various electronic appliances, including some digital cameras. It has the shape and size of two side-by-side AA batteries. This allows CR-V3 batteries to function in many devices originally designed only for AA batteries...

 (LB-01) lithium

Lithium battery

Lithium batteries are disposable batteries that have lithium metal or lithium compounds as an anode. Depending on the design and chemical compounds used, lithium cells can produce voltages from 1.5 V to about 3.7 V, over twice the voltage of an ordinary zinc–carbon battery or alkaline battery...

 or Li-Ion batteries.

Image quality

Image quality issues noted in the review by Steves Digicams were "The overall image quality is quite good but it does exhibit some problems with chromatic aberration (purple fringing) of objects with strong backlighting. This is a problem with all of the "Ultra Zoom" cameras and seems to be very difficult to eliminate when coupling a CCD imager to a long 8x-10x telephoto zoom lens." The DCRP review noted however that "the extra-low dispersion (ED) lens noticeably reduces purple fringing ... . It doesn't eliminate it, but it's much better than [earlier models]."