Olympus Stylus-7040

Viewfinder

No surprise, there's no viewfinder.

LCD

The 3-inch LCD 230,000-dot LCD doesn't look like anything special indoors, but it does offer Olympus' HyperCrystal II technology, which reflects light from behind the panel and back to the viewer, making it a good choice for shooting on sunny days.

When in record mode, you can choose between three displays by pressing the Info button. There's a clean screen, a display with shooting information and a live histogram at the bottom and a quick menu along the right side, and a version of that same screen (seen below) with a nine-box grid overlay.

The grid overlay shown here is useful for precisely lining up your shots.

Flash

The flash is small but seemed powerful enough, and positioned far from the center of the lens, which should help minimize red-eye/ There are three flash modes: auto, fill-flash, and red-eye, plus flash off.

The small flash is well located far from the lens.

Lens

The 7x lens is a key feature of this small camera, providing the equivalent of a 28-196mm lens on a 35mm camera. Maximum aperture at the widest lens setting is f/3.0. At full telephoto it's f/5.9, both reasonably fast for this class of camera.

Close-up shooting is another strength of this camera.  Macro mode lets you shoot from just 3.9 inches from your subject, and super macro mode further reduces the distance to a an intimidate 0.79 inches.

The 7x zoom starts at a nice 28mm wide angle

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

The Stylus-7040 uses the Olympus proprietary jack for standard AV and USB 2.0 connections, and a mini HDMI port for connecting to a high-definition TV.

High-def stills and video make the leap to the TV screen via HDMI

Battery

The camera runs on an LI-42B Lithium ion rechargeable battery.

The thin rechargeable battery fits easily in the 1-inch camera depth.

Memory

The camera accepts SD/SDHC memory cards. There is also 2 gigabytes of built-in memory.

Other Features

Built-in Camera Manual: There a win and a loss in this unusual feature. Olympus has including a digital version of the entire camera manual in internal memory, meaning it's always at your fingertips, and searchable. On the flip side, trumpeting it's 'ongoing environmental commitment to conserve natural resources and reduce its carbon footprint', the company has decided to stop shipping printed manuals with its cameras. As far as we're concerned, paper manuals are important: they're browsable, they can be annotated, bookmarked and read conveniently in a full-page format.

An in-camera manual is worthwhile, but we want a printed manual too.