Best $200 ever

Author's Rating:

Pros: Color, Sharpness, Price, Quality, Features

Cons: Some noise, Auto Focus is slow

The Bottom Line: 
If you want to have a camera to grow with you and provide extensive creative control, while on a budget, this is THE camera for you

Author's Review
For a brief overview I'll give my biased and semi-unsupported view, then I'll get to what's good and bad.

I love this camera. I've had this camera since the 17th of December 2004. The shear amount of features for $200, the 10x optics, and beautiful colors and sharpness. For some of the pictures I've taken (so you can see yourself) check http://thesenator.deviantart.com/ The 3.2 megapixels is enough to get good 8x10 prints. I would recommend that if you purchase this camera you also spend the saved money on Photoshop Elements or Photoshop 7.0 and another 256mb memory card. This is just an exceptional camera that assists you in focusing on what you are shooting rather than begging the camera to do something for you. Kudos to Olympus for creating an awesome line.

Pros:
Zoom
The 10x zoom is amazing. Don't think you'll fill the frame with a bird 200 ft away, but its one of the longest on the market and is great for any type of shooting. 3.2mp may sound small, especially when you're beaten over the head routinely by manufacturers saying that the megapixels determines the quality of the pictures. NO! Take a glance at mine and you'll see that they are spectacular. A good picture from a camera requires that the camera has good color, sharpness, low noise (grain for you 35mm people), great optics/lenses, and allows for accurate metering. Additionally the zoom will help determine. A 6mp camera with a 3x zoom will need to crop the image down to no more than 1/4 the total megapixels (smaller than a 2mp camera now!). the 10x zoom also allows for better composition. I almost never leave it at wide angle setting, rather I am always changing the zoom slightly to frame better and save cropping later.
Color
So the zoom is good, what else? The color is amazing. Auto white balance is pretty good. It has trouble with incandescent lighting, but outdoors I would recommend it. For those who don't know what white balance is I'll explain quickly. White balance is the color rating of white. If you never knew before, different sources of light produces a different cast. Sun and Florescent produce a blue cast (so does a flash) and your Incandescent has a warm yellow/red cast. Your eyes perceive the difference, but your brain automatically sees the normal color. Your camera must be told what this is. You have the option of auto, 7 presets, and two types of manual. One type of manual is the standard white or grey card in front of the camera and the other is a slide that has increments of blue and red to set the white balance if you don't like the presets or can't find a white surface.
Another aspect of color is simply the reproduction of color. Take a look at some of my photos and see how vibrant the reds are, the ability to have subdued blues and yellows, the "rainbow" effect of water, its just magnificent.
Sharpness
Sharpness (a product of the lenses, not the CCD) is impeccable. I was fooled at first into thinking that it suffered from corner softness, but that was because of the large aperture so there is actually very good sharpness edge to edge. Olympus does it again.
Metering
Metering is about standard, but the options that go along with it are spectacular. You have the option to select up to 8 points in the frame then have the camera average out the metering to get very nice, neat metering. And for those like me who don't know all about shutter speeds and apertures for certain lighting conditions, manual, aperture priority (where you set the aperture and the camera sets the shutter), and shutter priority the camera does very well at assisting and being told what to do.
Features
Tons Tons TONS of features. Amazing macro and super macro functions. Focusing is great, misses about 1 in 15 times. Contrast, saturation, sharpness controls are good. Flash intensity control, AF mode of iESP or spot, live histogram, Information of settings, panorama mode (great, but only with Olympus memory cards), and the ever great my mode settings which allow you to save your favorite settings for different situations.

Cons:
Noise
Noise is the same problem that has plagued pictures forever, its just grain in film. When you have a higher ISO setting, say 400, that means that it absorbs light 4 times as fast as ISO 100 and twice as fast as ISO 200. (or something like that) With digital cameras it takes the information from the CCD and rather than it being able to absorb light faster, it simply amplifies the data. This results in problems. Noise is a problem with all digital cameras, never believe anything that says no noise. But some have more noise than others and the C-740, being older, has some problems with noise. Don't worry though. ISO 100 is still great for even larger than 8x10 prints, and I would say that ISO 400 will yield pretty good to great 5x7 prints. Suffice to say, if you are not a pro or will be making posters or making a substantial living off it, you'll not care. If you DO want to have outstanding pictures and foresee yourself in the immediate future going into selling photos, then have yourself a look at the C-765 or C-770 from Olympus. They are outstanding and only about $100 more.

Speed
What I mean is auto focusing speed. This camera has one drastic problem and that is auto focusing speed. It can take up to 1 second for the focus to get there. But this is not horrible, especially in the ultra zoom class (7x or more zoom) Additionally if you prefocus its as soon as your finger presses all the way down. If you're taking pictures of sports my advice is to learn to prefocus and follow the action, use manual focus to anticipate the reoccurring action, and either of these you should use a smaller aperture so your depth of field is larger (focused area).

Speed part 2
This refers to the aperture and shutter. The shutter while quite good at 1/1000th of a second, sometimes you need faster to limit even more light. You might also want longer than 16 seconds for long exposures (sorry, there's no bulb mode). But for the amateur, even experienced, this isn't much of a problem. The other slight difficulty I've had is with the aperture. Its f/2.8-3.7 maximum through the zoom and f/8 minimum through the zoom. The maximum is great, nice, large, one of the best you can get period. Sadly though I would have liked a f/11 to increase just a little more depth of field. However this is still a great lens and you should not worry at all about it unless you KNOW you'll need it. (it hasn't bothered me at all yet)

Definitively one of the best still on the market for consumer/prosumer and is the best for around $200.