Great, inexpensive digital camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great images, long zoom, lightweight and small size, fast autofocus, overall ease of use, PRICE

Cons: Manual on CDROM, shutter "lag time," small LCD display

The Bottom Line: 
Stop sitting on the sidelines, buy this camera and GO DIGITAL! It's a sweet deal and a very nice camera.

Author's Review
This is my first digital camera, although I have been deeply involved in photography for decades, including darkroom work. I have always been interested in having a digital darkroom, and have scanned printed photos for years and used Photoshop for things I used to do in my darkroom. What finally prompted me to "bite the bullet" was a week-long trip to Disney World with my 5-year-old. The cost of developing the many photographs I envisioned taking was such that I decided that even if the quality was not that of film, it made sense for this family outing to "go digital." The C-740 can be found deeply discounted, has a great 10X zoom, is small enough to put into a fanny pack for those roller coaster rides and is an Olympus (which means something to me).
I read another review, which stated the battery life was deplorable, and had that experience with an HP digital camera I purchased for another daughter of mine, so I bought two sets of rechargeable batteries and a charger. I DIDN'T NEED THEM! I used the camera for a week, taking in excess of 400 photos on the original, non-rechargeable batteries!
I had no idea what to expect my memory requirements would be, but planned on taking at least the equivalent of 10 rolls of 24 exposure film, so I also bought a 512Mb xDFilm card. This was overkill as well. Even at pretty high resolution and quality settings, this card was capable of holding 500+ photos.
The camera included a "fast start" instruction card, allowing me to take my first photos immediately after inserting the batteries and memory. The preview screen on the back of the camera is pretty small, but was sufficient for me to see the exposure and focus looked good. At Disney World, some of my photos were slightly out of focus, due to the roughness of some of the rides, and I could not detect this on such a small screen.
The manual that came with the camera appeared to be substantial, but it is in several languages, so it is just a quick reference. The actual, detailed manual is on a CDROM and I still haven't had time to review it. This posed no problem, other than some difficulty navigating the menus, when I wanted to take close ups or change image quality settings.
The disappointments were the lag time between pushing the shutter button and actually taking the picture, and the slowness of the zoom to respond to my pressing the lever to zoom in or out. Not having owned a digital camera before, I cannot say if this is any slower than any other digital camera out there. I also didn't like that the zoom went back to wide angle when I turned the camera off. This was easily remedied by a menu selection, which left the zoom at the position I used it last (although it still retracted for storage).
Once home, I downloaded the photos into my Macintosh and easily created a slideshow in iPhoto. The two devices worked flawlessly together. Then I exported the slideshow to iDVD and burned a dvd of the slideshow to music. Playing this back for my family, on our high-definition 55" TV just 30 minutes after getting home was an amazing experience, and the photos looked great!
In summary, I found the camera to be easy to use, it produced great images, battery life was MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better than I imagined possible, and it fits right into a completely digital darkroom environment.
It makes me wonder why I waited so long to get a digital camera... Oh wait. I remember: I'm CHEAP!