"The bad news: no matter what setting we used, we couldn’t get the panorama function to operate. After much head-scratching we consulted the instruction book, and buried within the text was the news that this function only works with Olympus x-D cards. Ours was a Fujifilm product."

What's all that about then; some camera features dependent on the brand of memory card you stick in!? How on earth do they rationalise that?

Anyone know which airport that is? Looks really familiar but I can't place it - Geneva?

v. random, nice camera tho!

If so, it's changed a lot since I was there a few years ago (like, 20...)

Schiphol - used to be fascinated by the ceiling clock.

Not really -- just cute. 10MPixels, u1010 (binary, see) -- "MicroTen".

They pay people to dream up this stuff.

Wouldn't that improve if you used a better memory card? Several seconds in between shots sounds terrible...

I'm guessing a slow memory card may have also caused the panorama problems.

I have an older mju and the delay between pressing the button and the picture being taken is rather long. What is this one like?

The delay makes mine useless for action shots.

And the Photo of the woman in the hat looks like a nice stretch of Cornish coast near Polzeath.

XD cards from olympus have a 'marker' in the flash id sector.

you can have panoramic and 2 or 3 other features that only work with true olympus brand xd cards.

you can not access the flash id sector using a normal cardreader. you need low-level access (not filesystem level)

and it looks like brussels airport ...

really you guys aren't up to reviewing digital cameras in any meaningful way. That low light pic? shocking considering it was downsampled for the web page. CCD sucks donkey balls for that even Nikon has abandoned it in their new DSLRs after being F'd in the A for years by Canon using CMOS. Most of my work is in very dark conditions, its one of the biggest issues I look for. (of course sticking 10MP on a tiny sensor isnt the cleverest move, but its like the marketing of Pentium IV... ooh clock speed shiny)

"oooh it does 7x zoom". yeah. yawn. who cares. focus more on the crap wide angle - which is 37mm (equivalent) and bloody crap. Considering a lot of usage for handbagcams comes from parties and the like, please show trying to take a picture of a family gathering in a 10' square living room without having to stand outside. Anything greater that 28mm at the wide end is a pain for most events.

if you want to look at how to properly review a digital camera's performance go to dpreview.com. Aside from a few spec this review told me nothing, you may have just talked about how pretty it looked or how you saw Paris using one for her latest dodgy pic collection.

Hence the sea of blue KLM self check-in things.

Camera a little too consumer for my tastes, currently using a Canon G9 & 10D (flooded with salt water and still going strong!)

Just say

mu ten ten......Not hard really....

and the problem with your memory cards is that there are FOUR types of xD cards:

- standard grade, which are slow and have no extra functions enabled

- Type M : which are faster and enable panorama features (even Fuji's cards work if Type M I believe)

- Type H : High-speed, for faster shot to shot, and panorama (rare to find, and expensive)

- Type M+ : coming out in the next month, will enable high-res video recording without the current 10second max record time, until card memory runs out.

I suspect you had a cheap standard grade card, which has been outdated for at least two years. Anyone with a recent Oly wants a Type M or M+ to get access to the features.

The Oly 1030SW is the camera you should have reviewed though - a 28mm wide-angle lens with internal 3.8x optical zoom, shockproof, waterproof, and same sensor. A much more interesting and unique camera...

I like olympus camera's for their simplicity, good value and good quality pics, oh and pretty robust too. I've had a few now and my next one will be olympus too, glad to see they've stuck with keeping the UI simple :)

My first digital SLR (not interchangeable lens) was the Oly 1400L. It had a Sparc processor and was running an embedded version of SunOS. As an oldtime kernel hacker I really liked that and really liked that the embedded timestamp was in UNIX epoch (secs since 8AM 01/01/1970) format. Wonder what they are using now.