A set of direct mode select buttons make creative photography easy. A landscape mode captures foreground and background with equal clarity. You can also create dramatic portraits with a sharply defined subject and shallow depth of field. A night- scene mode keeps the shutter open for up to two-second exposures. An intelligent flash automatically fires in low-light situations and includes fill-in flash, red-eye reduction, and soft illumination settings.

Product Description
With true 4x zoom and date printing, fully automatic Olympus IS-20 QD 35mm zoom lens reflex camera puts outstanding versatility and value in the palm of your hand. IS-20 packs the advanced engineering functionality of an SLR camera system in a single lightweight package.IS-20 creates dramatic portraits, with sharply defined subject and shallow depth of field. Landscape mode captures foreground and background with equal clarity. Full Auto mode automatically sets shutter speed and aperture. Direct mode select buttons make creative photography easy. Night Scene mode keeps shutter open for up to two-second exposures. Audible beeps confirm focus. Elegantly styled with silver-metallic finish body, IS-20 delivers high degree of optical resolution with reduced distortion. It allows you to stop the action with a shutter speed up to 1/2000 second, shooting consistently sharp photos across the entire frame. IS-20 also provides quartz date and time recording for your pictures.

This camera has all the features that you need and none that you don't. It is essentially a fully-automatic SLR camera, so you have the best of both worlds. With an SLR, when you look through the viewfinder, you're actually looking through the lens, so what you see is what you get (with composition and focus). Unlike a fully-automatic camera, which has parallax error associated with its separate viewfinder.
The IS-20 is "zoomier" (28-110mm) than a standard SLR camera lens (28-80mm), but yet it is quite a small camera when compared to most SLRs. You can also get a telephoto extender that screws on the end making it effectively a 210mm lens; although you will have to use that pretty much at full-zoom and the camera lens cap won't retract when it is in place.
The other advantage it has over fully-automatic cameras is that you can use various filters on the end of the lens. You might first consider getting a 2X macro lens and a red lens for improving the contrast in B&W photography.

I used my sister's Canon EOS-500N for two overseas trips and I found that about half of the features I just didn't use. With this Olympus, however, I use ALL the features. The two most commonly used modes are the scenery mode and the portrait mode. It also has spot metering, a timer, and a nifty lens cap. Plus it has full-auto mode; just press the green button and shoot!

It has twin flashes, one for wide-angle and one for telephoto, and they are mighty-powerful! There are four flash modes: autoflash, no flash, red-eye reducing, and forced flash activation. They're all important. Having no flash is crucial for night time scenes; just put the camera on something steady, select the timer -that way the camera will go off by itself and you won't bump it- and you will take photos that look like a pro.

Initially, the thing that bugged me most is that you can't manually set the shutter speed and have the camera figure out the correct aperture. But now I tend to think that the only time I really wanted to set the shutter speed myself is when I wanted the fastest possible shutter speed, and the camera has a mode that automatically does that for you (up to 1/2000 sec). You can only manually select the shutter speed for long-time exposures greater than 1 sec (1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30 & 60 sec), but then camera fixes the aperture at f8, so you have to take a few shots to make sure the photo won't be under/overexposed. You can, on the other hand, choose an aperture from f4.5 to f22, and have the camera automatically use the right shutter speed. That allows you to change the depth of field of a scene.

On the down side: for the smallish size, it is on the heavy side. But even though I am usually very obsessive when it comes to lightweight objects, in this case I can easily overlook that, because of its sheer convenience.

If you're thinking of buying a digital camera, know that film has the equivalent of 1500 "pixels" per inch, so that a 24x36mm negative, assuming a good lens and fine-grained film, will have over 3 megapixels. Not only that, but this camera can use a wide range of film speeds, from 25 ISO all the way to 3200 ISO!!
The other reason I didn't want a digital camera, is that I've been known to take about a thousand photos while I'm travelling, and I refuse to fork out that much money for the high-capacity memory cards required. Remember that 35mm film can be bought ANYWHERE.


A cross between an idiot-proof camera and a SLR   October 15, 2000
 15 out of 15 found this review helpful

NICE! I'm glad I've swapped my Canon EOS SLR for this!

While I find the coverage of its built-in flash is a bit on the harsh side (my 8-year old Canon Photura is better in this area), the photos taken with the camera under daylight can match up to any good SLR camera in the market. All that performance is delivered in a nice, easy-to-carry, all-in-one package.

You've got a winner here, Olympus!


Olympus iS-20   October 15, 2000
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

After using telephoto lenses it was hard for me to go back to standard photos. Friends and family photograph better when the camera isn't "in their face." Still, manual telephotos are cumbersome. Too many right moments lost. This camera solved my problems. I'm online here because I'm having to shop for a new Olympus iS-20. The one I had is missing!