Olympus CAMEDIA C-4040 ZOOM Digital Camera

Sitting in front of a monitor all day (and all night for some of us) can make you lose sight of important current events such as the changing of the seasons. Fortunately, if you don't get out much, you can tell what time of year it is by the product releases you read. Motherboards? Must be Springtime (Computex). Game consoles? Must be time to do some Xmas shopping (online, of course). Well, it must be summer because we're seeing gads of new digital cameras coming out (a lot of folks take vacations this time of year, right?). Here's another: Olympus just let us know about its CAMEDIA C-4040 ZOOM digital camera. It has a 4 Megapixel CCD (similar to Toshiba's PDR-M81 ), an F1.8 3X zoom lens, and image quality and noise reduction technologies to let you print photos as large as 16" x 20". Other features include auto and manual white balance, multiple exposure settings, a two-frame-per-second burst mode, QuickTime Movie capabilities, black and white and sepia shooting modes, auto exposure bracketing (AEB), and several compression settings. The CAMEDIA C-4040 ZOOM will be available in August with an estimated street price of $1099. It ships with a 16MB Olympus SmartMedia memory card, USB cable, AV cable, two 3V lithium battery packs (CR-3V), lens cap and retainer cord, remote control, Olympus Camedia Master 2.5 Utility Software for image manipulation and creation, instruction manual, QuickStart Guide, lens cap, and strap. Now, slather yourself in SPF 30 and go smell the roses.