Olympus C-211 Zoom (2000)

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Announced by Olympus on 2000-08-27 at the Seybold Seminars SF 2000. Thus not in 1999 as many websites claim. What's the specialty here? Well it's only the third digital camera with built-in printer back then. First being the KingJim DaVinci DV55 (a thermal printing digicam), then the Fuji PR21 and now Olympus. The C-211 was a bulky rectangular camera with a built-in printer that uses Polaroid 500 films. Allegedly it also works with Fujix Instax films but this has not been confirmed yet.

The built-in print engine was delivered by Polaroid. The C-211 Zoom also included some of the cool features that became a standard in Olympus digital camera models, such as sequential shooting mode where one can shoot up to 45 in SQ (standard-quality) mode at 1.3 photos/second and the QuickTime Movie mode. The QuickTime Movie mode captured motion video in QVGA quality at 320x240 pixels and 15 frames per second for up to approximately 15 seconds. Apart from that it also had the possibility to not only print one image but also several images on one print (a feature called Panorama Stitching).

Printing of one photo took as long as 15 seconds in 640x480 resolution at 210DPI. The rest was pretty standard, 3x optical zoom, 2x digital zoom, auto-focus, white-balance, advanced flash features like red-eye reduction and slow sync, self timer and auto shut off. Another feature, well known from the Sony Mavica series, was the possibility to open a latch near the LCD screen, so that light could fall in and one could save energy by shutting off the backlight source for said screen.

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