This is a shot of the left side of the camera with the access door open. Fortunately the camera comes with a lens cap cord that attaches to the body, otherwise I’m sure I would lose the cap in a matter of seconds. The dial with the crooked arrow on it is a cover for the camera’s external flash connection. Behind the access door is the connection for an AC adapter (not included), a mini-din connector for plugging the camera into a television, (a mini-din to composite A\V cable is supplied) and a mini USB port. The camera features what Olympus calls “USB auto-connect”. What this means is the camera needs absolutely no drivers for a USB connection to a computer. Yes you heard correctly, absolutely no drivers. You simply connect the USB cable to your computer and turn the camera on to playback mode. It is then recognized in Windows Explorer as a removable hard disk, and you can drag-and-drop, cut and paste, and delete files just like a regular hard drive. I don’t think it’s possible to get much more idiot-proof than that.
On top of the camera is the function dial, shutter button, and zoom control. Yes, those spots are supposed to be there, the plastic grip is textured to make it harder for the camera to slip. The dial switches the camera between its four main operating modes. The green arrow is the playback mode for looking at shots that have already been taken. “P” is the fully automatic mode. All you have to do is center the target in the view finder or LCD, press the shutter button half way to autofocus, and then take the shot. If you prefer a more hands on approach, you switch to “A\S\M”. This stands for manual aperture control, manual shutter speed control, or completely manual mode. The last main function is the movie mode that allows you to capture (at the highest-quality setting) up to 30 seconds' worth of low-resolution (320x240 pixels) QuickTime video on the included 16MB SmartMedia memory card.
The C-4040 has the wide range of features you would expect on a high-end camera, including custom white balance and red/blue white-balance compensation, flash exposure compensation, spot and matrix metering, and automatic exposure bracketing. There's also a two-frame-per-second Burst mode, audio annotation, panorama, sepia, blackboard and whiteboard modes, sharpness and contrast adjustments, and others. This will let you fine-tune at the capture stage for high-quality pictures without using image-editing software (and risking potential degradation). In addition, the C-4040 has pixel mapping, which identifies dead pixels and replaces them with adjacent pixels for optimum image quality.
In both automatic and manual modes you set the desired image type and resolution for the shot, which determines the image quality and how much memory the shot will use. It offers a wide range of resolutions, compressions, and file formats, including JPEG, RAW, and TIFF, at all optical resolutions from 640x480 to 2272x1704. Additionally, in JPEG mode the camera can use interpolation to blow up the image to 2816x2112 or 3200x2400. One uncompressed TIFF shot at the maximum 2272x1704 will use up the included 16mb card, but shooting uncompressed is pretty pointess as each shot takes about 10 seconds to write and eats massive amounts of memory. Nontheless, if you are planning on taking a lot of high resolution shots, a large SmartMedia card would be a good idea.
