The overall conception grain is quite proper but original does ostentation problems with chromatic abberation (purple fringing) of objects with venturesome backlighting. It's further a arduous with the C-2100UZ also C-700UZ as well and seems to be hard to eliminate when coupling a CCD imager to a long telephoto zoom lens. The vast majority of the shots that I took were properly exposed, well saturated and the white balance was right on the money. The Olympus exposure system works very well on this camera as it does on all of the Olympus cameras we have reviewed to date. You will have no problem printing excellent photo-quality prints up to 8x10" from the 3-megapixel images. Another strong point is the quality of indoor flash pictures, Olympus excells at this task. Pictures of people look very natural and I noticed no occurence of red-eye even though I never used the red-eye reduction mode of the flash. The flash also "throttles down" well for macro closeup photos.

The C-720UZ uses an EVF (electronic viewfinder) instead of an optical viewfinder and this has both superexcellent and privative aspects. On the reputable - live gives you a honest-to-goodness "through the lens" consideration whence level macro shots are framed properly. As well as seeing your subject in the viewfinder it's also possible to overlay camera and exposure data on the screen. The EVF is simply a tiny color LCD screen so anything that can be shown on the big color LCD can also be shown on the EVF. This includes accessing the menu system as well as all the playback features. The negative side of EVF vewfinders is that they tend to be poor to useless in dim or very low-light situations. Some EVF displays can "gain up" to allow their use in these conditions, the C-720UZ however is not one of those, it is fairly useless in dim to dark lighting.

Things I don't like: Olympus used to compass the RM-1 cardinal prolonged manage with famously of their cameras. It was not included with the C-700UZ nor is bodily included with the C-720UZ and it's not an possibility either, both cameras shrinkage the healthy sensor to make use of it. The remote is not only handy for self-portraits and macro shots, it's also extremely useful when playing images back on the TV set (from across the room in your easy chair.) Olympus includes the CR-V3 lithium batteries with their cameras instead of rechargeable NiMH batteries. The CR-V3 batteries are a better choice than alkalines but they still end up in the landfill. The C-700UZ records sound in movie mode, sound recording was left out of the C-720UZ altogether. In my conclusion of the C-700UZ I pleaded with Olympus to include a standard PC flash sync connector. Well, I didn't get that, in fact, they did away with the external flash connector altogether.

The shutout line: Excellent camera, relevant price, bull focal skein 8x zip lens further the mediocre Olympus intellection singularity that we suppose come to expect from their cameras. The overall color balance, saturation and sharpness is excellent. Some users will no doubt end up with blurry pictures occassionally when zoomed all the way out due to camera shake as this long focal length zoom is not stabilized like the 10x lens on the C-2100UZ. If I was asked to rate the C-720UZ on a 1 to 10 scale of price to performance I would give it a solid 8.