Advantage: Olympus

Advantage: Olympus

The ability to swivel the lens independently of the LCD section does help with this, and it does allow you to get some shots at angles you'd never be able to achieve with the Olympus.

At first I was always pushing the lever the wrong direction. I finally found a way to remember how the lever works: if you push it away from you, the image gets smaller, as if you were pushing the subject away. If you pull it towards you, the image gets bigger, as if you were bringing the subject closer. (I wonder if the control was designed purposely with this in mind.) A zoom all the way from wide to telephoto takes a little over two seconds.

Speed advantage: Olympus

Ease of Use advantage: Nikon

When using the Olympus I frequently switch modes to see if I'm getting the shots that I want; I barely give it conscious thought. Not so with the Nikon.

Huge Advantage: Olympus

The worst part of this is that you have to pass through the OFF setting to go from taking pictures to reviewing them. This means that whatever zoom, macro mode, and flash settings you had are lost when you return to record mode to take your next picture.

Unfortunately, at least in my mind, the plus sign is associated with "forward" and the minus sign with "backward", so I am consistently screwing this up.

You use the telephoto rocker switch to move up and down through the menu. Notice that the left button is down and the right button is up. Unfortunately, having grown up reading English, I am used to the idea of "left to right;" left is backward and upward; right is forward and downward. If Nikon had reversed the arrows, by the way, it would have been great mnemonic for the function of the rocker switch - the wide angle pushes the subject away and the telephoto brings the subject closer, as the arrows would clearly indicate.

Advantage: Nikon

Nikon's date setting shows four digits for year; Olympus shows only two. With all the brouhaha over the Year 2000 Problem it would have been politically advantageous for Olympus to spring for four digits.

The Macintosh implementation was not done as an afterthought; it is also clean and fast. I don't know about the Windows version, but the Macintosh version also includes an Adobe Photoshop plug-in.

Huge Beyond Belief Advantage: Olympus

The Nikon software has been designed to make the camera look like a hard disk in Windows Explorer or "My Computer." When you open this volume you see a display of the thumbnails from the camera rather than a file list. While it's loading in those thumbnails, you are pretty much stuck; the rest of the system bogs down to a crawl (at least on my Pentium it does). After the thumbnails are loaded, you'd better make sure you don't click a different folder or close that window, for when you return to see the contents of the Nikon "disk," yes, you guessed it. It goes out to the serial port for all the thumbnails again.

This is truly a horrible interface, since (surprise) a serial port is not a disk; it doesn't even work at floppy disk speeds.

The Macintosh version works in the same way, making the camera appear as a volume on the desktop. I'm not particularly thrilled about having another extension added to the "march of the icons" as my system boots, either. Worse, the software is excruciatingly slow; it doesn't appear to run the serial port at full speed. Worst of all is that the software doesn't work very well. Downloading from the 4MB Compact Flash card that came with the camera worked fine, but version 1.01 of the software took an hour and a half to download fifty pictures from a 20MB SanDisk Compact Flash card (which had been formatted in the camera before use), and the resulting files could not be read by either Adobe Photoshop or DeBabelizer.

The considerable effort that it must have taken to make the camera look like a mountable device would have been far better spent in creating a stand-alone download program and a Photoshop plug-in and making both of them fast and robust.