The 790SW's menu system is intuitively
designed around two main branches. One branch appears on the screen when
the camera is in shooting mode; the other when it’s in playback
mode. A quick menu of commonly used tasks can be displayed by pressing
the OK/FUNC button at the center of the arrow pad. In addition, menus
for controlling exposure compensation, the flash, macro modes and the
self-timer are available by pressing the arrow keys while the camera is
in shooting mode.
You access the primary menu system by pressing the menu button located
at 11 o'clock from the arrow pad. In shooting mode, these options are
available on the camera's display.
· Camera menu ·
Image Quality · Setup · Silent Mode · Reset
The arrow pad is used to move from
item to item on the screen. When you select an item with the OK/FUNC key,
a submenu will be displayed. For items like Reset and Silent Mode, the submenus
can be a simple yes or no, or on or off. Other items offer a rich array
of choices. For example, here are the choices under the camera menu.
· WB. Lets you set the white balance
for a shot. Options are auto, sunny, cloudy, incandescent lighting and
three fluorescent light settings.
· ISO. Light sensitivity, or ISO, can be chosen for a scene.
Choices are auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600.
· Drive. Lets you pick sequential shooting
modes for a session. Modes are single shot, continuous and high continuous.
Although high continuous is faster than continuous, image sizes are smaller.
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· Fine Zoom. This enhancement of the optical zoom can be turned on
or off from this item.
· Digital Zoom. Turns this feature on and off.
· ESP. Two modes for metering light
are available--averaging and spot.
· AF Mode. Give you access to the cameras autofocusing mode--Face
Detect, iESP and Spot.
· Panorama. Shows guides for taking panorama pictures with the
camera. You can set the direction that you'll be panning for photos to
be included in the shot with the left or right arrow keys on the arrow
pad.
The setup menu permits you to
configure the camera to suit your personal tastes--set the language, choose
an image to display on startup; pick a menu color and background theme;
control the volume of the camera's beeps and alerts and sound playback;
chose a shutter sound and manipulate its volume; display a photo immediately
after it has been captured and adjust the display's brightness.
There are time functions, too, such as set time and date, create a second
clock for another time zone and an alarm clock. Then there are system
functions--choosing NTSC or PAL video output, formatting an xD card, backing
up internal memory to a card, picking file and folder naming conventions,
pixel mapping to keep the unit's CCD fine-tuned, turning on power saving
functions to prolong battery life and activating the camera's LED illuminator.
The image quality menu allows you to pick
a quality and image size for your shots from SHQ (3072 x 2304 pixels)
to SQ2 (1600 x 1200 to 640 x 480 pixels).
In playback mode, there's a set of menus for working with snaps after
they're shot. Here are the main choices from the playback menu.
Setup and Silent Mode mirror their functions
in Camera menu.
The Playback menu lets you lock images so you won't accidently erase
them, rotate vertical photos and add four seconds of sound to a picture.
With the Erase menu, you can select an image to erase or erase all images
in the camera. You can also scrap single images while viewing them in
playback mode by pressing a button placed at five o'clock from the arrow
pad.
The Add Favorite item permits you to save up to nine images to the camera's
internal memory and display them at any time without the need to tie up
space on your memory card. Favorite images can be used as a startup screen
or as backgrounds for menus.
Some in-camera editing of photos can be done
from the Perfect Fix item. It lets you fix "redeye" in a photo
or adjust the dark areas in an image captured with bright backlighting.
The feature seems less than perfect, though, as Olympus cautions that
the processes may not work on all photos and that when it does work, the
image may suffer some quality loss.
With Slideshow mode, you can automatically
display the pictures in the camera. Transitions between photos can be
customized. Options are normal, which "cuts" from photo to photo
in the slideshow; fader, which fades between images; slide, where pics
slide into view from the top or bottom of the screen; and zoom, where
snaps start small and expand to fill the LCD.
Photo sizes can be altered with
the Edit item. When the dimensions of a pic are changed, the original image
is preserved and the altered version saved as a copy. You can also alter
the color of a photo in Edit mode. Saturation can be boosted or blunted
or the image can be turned into a sepia or black-and-white print. Other
tricks that can be performed in Edit are placing a graphic frame around
an image, adding text to it, combining it with a calendar to create a photo
calendar page ready for printing and ripping nine frames from a video and
turning them into still shots.
The last item, Print Order, lets you attach printing information to images
stored on a card in the camera.
You don't have to drill down through menus for
some functions. In shooting mode, when you press the OK/FUNC key, a menu
bar appears along the left side of the LCD giving you quick access to a
mode of operation--auto or program, white balance settings, ISO, drive and
light metering.
What's more, you can display menus for some
additional functions by pressing the arrow pad keys in shooting mode.
Those functions are exposure compensation (12 o'clock), flash (three o'clock),
self-timer (six o'clock) and macro mode (nine o'clock).
As with all its cameras, Olympus includes its Master 2 software with
the 790SW. The program, which works on both PCs and Macs, contains both
editing and organization features. The PC version of the application also
has a trial version of a slideshow program by Muvee.
The program's interface has four panes. One
lets you view your photos as either albums or folders. The folder view
reflects the file structure on your computer. The view is similar to what
you'd see in an Explorer window on a PC or a Finder Window on a Mac. The
album view lets you organize pictures based on criteria like time stamps
or similar
file names. On my PC,
my images are stored in the My Pictures folder, and Master 2 took a valiant
stab at creating albums from information in that folder. Most of the albums
were based on time stamps. On the Mac, where my photos are stored in iPhoto
'08, no albums were created by the software. It seems the PC version of
the program is a little savvier than its Mac counterpart.
Beside the album/folder area is a pane for
displaying thumbnails of photos. Next to that is a properties pane. It
displays a histogram of the currently selected image and information about
it. There's basic information organized into hardware, shooting, image
and album info and there's a complete run down of all the EXIF data associated
with the picture. The last pane is an RSS reader for keeping tabs on news
from the Internet.
Above the quartet of panes are the menu and tool bars.
From the file menu, you can transfer images
into the program from a camera, optical media or location on your system;
create and edit albums or groups of albums; add photos to an album; find
photos by filename, album name, shooting date, comments or file type; and
print photos.
The edit menu lets
you open an editing or RAW development window; copy, cut and paste images;
rotate images; and edit shooting dates and comments.
From the view menu, you can look at images as a slideshow; control what
toolbars are visible; and set the size and sort criteria for thumbnails.
The tools menu allows you to resize images or convert them to other files
formats; create panoramas; open the Muvee slideshow application (PC only);
and access the program's options.
From the camera menu, you can obtain information about a camera connected
to your computer.
Then there's a help menu for tapping into online help.
The tool bar beneath the menu
bar gives you quick access to common functions such as transferring photos,
running slide shows, printing photos, editing RAW files and creating panoramas.
The software is a robust program--especially for Mac users used to using
iPhoto--and is a cut above a lot of software tossed in with digital cameras
these days.
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Interface & Software
