Olympus Stylus-7040

Auto Mode

There's a single iAuto mode, which locks out all your choices except flash on or off, self-timer and scene mode selection. The 'i' stands for intelligent: the camera attempts to recognize the scene at hand (portrait, landscape, night portrait, macro, or sport)  and adjust exposure settings accordingly.

Movie Mode

The Stylus-7040 records 720p high-def video, stored in MPEG4 format. There's an HDMI out port for playing back your movies directly to an HDTV set, and a one-step button on the camera back to jump instantly into video recording mode, without fussing with dials or menus and potentially missing a great moment..

Drive/Burst Mode

The camera supports multiple continuous shooting modes, though working with a pre-production camera it's unfair to judge how speedily it performs.

The self-timer has two available settings, 12 seconds and 2 seconds. 

Playback Mode

There are three playback mode screens: one with no overlay, one with the basic file number, date and time information, and a third displaying a smaller view of the imagre on the left and full file informaton on the right. It would be better if the full-screen picture view was more informative, but it's not a major problem.

In addition to the single image display, you can view 12 or 30 thumbnail images on a single screen. Move the zoom control to the right when in full-screen mode and you can magnify the photo up to 10 times.

Image edting options include red-eye fix, shadow adjustment, Beauty Fix (to smooth complexions and add a twinkle to the eye). Photos vcan be resized, cropped and rotated, turned black and white or sepia, and made into a calendar you can print out. All in all, there's a reasonable level of fun features here, though not a whole lot of fine image tweaking capability.

When watchiung movies, you can fast-forward or reverse, and move frame by frame.

Custom Image Presets

There are 14 scene modes in all, a generous collection that includes portrait, landscape, night scnee, night portrait, sport, indoor, candle, self-portrait, sunset fireworks cuisine, documents, beach & snow and pet.

Olympus has made a big deal of the Art Filters in its recent digital SLRs, that produce dramatic effects with no particular effort or expertise. A version of this feature has been ported over the compact camera line with Magic Filters, used while shooting. These include Pop Art, Pinhole, Fisheye and Drawing (creates an empty pencil outline of the subject). The trick here is remembering that these filters are used in record mode, not as editing effects later on, so you don't have an unaltered version of the shot if you want one. That said, we do kind of like the Pop Art mode for souping up the vibrance and saturation of flat-looking subjects.

Another interesting feature is in-camera panorama shooting. This system can combine three images: you take the first and the camera superimposes a marker and a target point on the screen. When you line these two up, it automatically takes the second shot, and so on. It's fun and it's easy, a nice change from the systems that make you try painstakingly matching up shadowed images of your previous shot with your current position. And if three photos don't give you the wide-angle wonder you seek, you can also combine up to 10 images on your computer, using provided software.