In appearance the Olympus Camedia is rather ordinary, mirroring closely what is standard fare in the conventional SLR field, and perhaps even a little dated. This however belies the superior performance that the Olympus put in this month, which impressed the Labs team enough to award it with the Labs Award for Quality.

If somewhat ordinary looking, the C-3030 is definitely practical, sporting a solid grip and button positioning that SLR users will feel familiar with. The 1.8in LCD display serves as the main control centre for the Olympus, functioning as the menu interface and main viewfinder, though the C-3030 also has an optical viewfinder and status display. The menu is intuitive to navigate around using the direction buttons on the jog dial, though many of the functions are marked only with a symbol that may be cryptic for some. Fortunately explanations are available in the manual, making the Olympus in the end an extremely versatile and fun camera to use.

There is a huge arsenal of options at your disposal including the ability to adjust white balance, ISO rating, exposure time, and flash levels. You are also able to toggle between aperture or shutter priority, manual focus and full-auto options. Similarly, there are five quality settings available, the uncompressed TIFF format being the highest. Not only that, you are also given the option to assign a desired image resolution to three of the image quality settings. For instance, you may have 17 TIFF images at 640 x 480 or one TIFF image at 2,048 x 1,536 on the 16MB SmartMedia memory card.

The test images, taken at maximum settings are simply spectacular. The rendered test subject faithfully depicts the full range of vibrant colours with stunning fidelity and true to life ambience and depth. Olympus - whose sole focus is on photography - has packed its experience and expertise into the C-3030 and it shows. A well-deserved Quality Award winner.