Case Study in DigiCam Obsolescence: Olympus C-60 Zoom

Overall image quality was good, but not great. My main beef with the C-60's photos is noise. There's too much of it, and frankly I'm not surprised -- the more pixels you stuff into a tiny sensor, the worse the noise is going to be. Noise doesn't just add "grain" to your images, it eats away at details too. The C-60Z's photos have what call a "video capture look", a kind of fuzziness. (from DCRP Review: Olympus C-60 Zoom; see the review for image samples)

This is a perfect illustration of Bob Atkins' point that sensor size limits pixel count.

Further, the camera's value has dropped over 50 percent in just 19 months.
At its introduction, the C-60 Zoom cost $449. Now it is being sold for as little as $215.Why? Probably because, since the introduction of the C-60 19 months ago, Olympus has introduced no fewer than 19 similar models (to see this first hand, visit Olympus Digital Cameras at dpreview.com). This is not even counting the four noncompact digital cameras Olympus introduced during the same period. This underscores the alarming rate at which digicams depreciate, as described elsewhere in this weblog by Dante Stella, Ken Rockwell, and KB Camera. In contrast, the latest Olympus Stylus Epic compact film camera is still basically the same model Olympus introduced in 1996. Currently selling for $90, the Stylus Epic captures about 10 megapixels of information per 35mm film frame.