Why is it trying to be so godamn clever? Sometimes I just want to point & shot - I just want to capture what I see...but not with my camera.
It comes out too dark or something & it takes lots of fiddling to get the picture I want.
On a sunny day I always have to resort to setting the shutter speed manually. At night I have to fiddle around turning the red colour down with blue & using slow flash (on tripod) to capture the real colour - if I use normal flash I get nothing of the background at all. & you have to have such a bloody steady hand to get a night picture - I don't mean normal night picture (where I know you must have a tripod) but even when there's lots of light around it comes out blurry...
When I use my mobile phone it just takes the picture that is there. Why on earth can't my Olympus that cost several hundred pounds more than my mobile do that too?
What's the point of "point & shot" function if I can't just do that???
"... On a sunny day I always have to resort to setting the shutter speed manually..."
Huh? Something is wrong.
By today's standards the C-70 is a clunky old relic, but it should still be taking perfectly fine photos...
Cheers,
Terry
Agree with #1 here. These cameras don't have brains and do require a little input from the button pusher. It looks like you need to understand the basics of shutter speeds and exposure metering. P&S cameras tend to have limited maximum apertures so will need support for low light conditions.
Curious, I have two Olympus cameras, a C5050 and a C8080 and I'm extremely pleased with both of them whether I use them in a point and shoot mode or otherwise. In fact "point and shoot" does give some extraordinarily good results and has only let me down on one occasion.
My experience with a number of compact digitals including an Oly C2020 has been quite good. In fully auto mode they all took very good pictures.
Check you settings carefully. Especially the white balance. (I just encountered someone having trouble with color on her Canon 350D. Turned out she had the WB set to flash rather than daylight.)
Try to shoot along someone else who also has a digital and see how your fully auto shots compare to theirs.
I'm betting on settings or broken camera.
The night shot thing is down to poor (or unavailable) high-ISO shooting. You need to be able to balance the flash with available light if you want good background detail - and that requires either very long shutter speeds, or high ISO. Get a dSLR, or a Fuji F31fd.
Colours sound like a white balance problem. Some cameras are better than others at that. I tend to shoot RAW, so I'm outside the vagaries of that one thankfully. If the camera has a manual white balance setting, make sure it's appropriate - sunny for sunny conditions, cloudy for cloudy - tungsten when lit by artificial bulbs.
Surprised the cameraphone handles it better though...
Perhaps your various fiddling with settings has left you with an unworkable combination in that regard. You might want to check if there is a way to return the camera to original factory settings, and then look at it's performance. I have the Olympus C-5060 Wide Zoom, and in point and shoot mode it gives good exposures and sharp pix under good conditions. In flash situations though, a lot of detail is lost outside the range of the flash. Perhaps that's one of the limitations of digital point and shoot cameras. At Christmas I used that Olympus inside a house at a family party, and also a Nikon F70 loaded with Fuji Pro 800, and the film camera recorded much more detail in the shadows.
It does give fantastic pictures most of the time - but at times it takes ages to get it to take that perfect picture.
We have done & do total re-set regularly.
Ok explain it like to a child - how do I check the settings/wb then? How do I figure out if it's right or wrong?
Do you have the manual? (Not being snippy here, I don't have one.)
If so, see how you get to the WB settings.
If not, start at the Menu. If your camera breaks things down into sub-menus such as Recording, Playback, etc. it will be under Recording.
One thing - lots of cameras don't do well with WB set to "Auto". It seems to be best to set to "Daylight", "Cloudy", whatever.
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