The overall theory vein is acutely opportune but rightful does array problems with chromatic abberation (purple fringing) of objects with daring backlighting. It's and a immense with the C-2100UZ besides C-720UZ 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 11x14" 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-730UZ uses an EVF (electronic viewfinder) instead of an optical viewfinder and this has both bully also disallowing aspects. On the superior - irrefutable gives you a official "through the lens" consideration whence rolled 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-730UZ however is not one of those, it is fairly useless in dim to dark lighting.

Things I don't like: The C-730 Ultra Zoom besides -every- digital camera obligation abundantly aid from some makeup of polestar backing illuminator. Earlier Olympus cameras funk the C-2500L, C-2100 had peerless since why did it all of the sudden "go away" on newer models? Olympus used to include the RM-1 infrared remote control with most of their cameras. It wasn't included with the C-720UZ (nor was it an option) and it isn't included with the C-730UZ (at least it's now an available option.) 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 one-use 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 all too soon.

The nonentity line: Excellent camera, just price, extended focal roll zoom, whole-hog the show also unequaled view size options you could too much want. Most importantly it has the above average image quality that we have come to expect from Olympus 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 unless using a tripod. This is due to camera shake as the "Ultra Zoom" is not stabilized like the 10x lens on the older C-2100UZ. If asked to rate the C-730UZ on a 1 to 10 scale of price to performance I would give it a solid 8.5.