There exist
(a) compression or quality levels, the higher quality, the less JPEG compression artifacts you get.
(b) If you photographed your table in (almost) darkness, the image or its shadowy areas will have digital noise.
Also there are sensitivity levels (pretty much like with film: the higher sensitivity, the faster your shutter speed will be, but the more sensitivity, the noisier the image.
(c) Colour balance settings. Film is not adjustable, the digital cameras are. If you are set for outdoors, your indoor shots will be urine yellow. If your setting is for incandenscent indoor light, the outdoors will be intensively blue.

(d) Olympus cameras also include "everything automatic" settings, but then it's the camera with its tiny worm brain that decides what and how to shoot.

a) I am well aware of that. In fact I did a series of shots, from the highest to the lowest resolution and all of them are not pretty, shall we say.
b) Same for this one. The flash did go on, but it wasn't full power, so the background light (two lamps) seemed to do at least part of the job. I can't attribute the poor quality to lack of light, in one word.
c) Yes, Dr. Frued would be quite happy, (if he'd ever gotten this quotation).

d) this is Camedia 5000. It has manual controls, and I do think that in such simple setting even the automatic ones should work okay. I tried a few of the auto settings and they all did fairly poorly.

Conclusion: I think the camera is just plain bad. I still have to check the landsapes I did today, but I have little hope for them.

(I am not sure what would be better, though, in 300 USD price range.)

1. www.dpreview.com --> reviews or www.imaging-resource.com --> reviews
Check the reviews on these sites. They describe camera controls and provide image quality comparisons.

2. MIXED lighting is the biggest photographic problem: flash imitates daylight (about 6500 Kelvin degrees), while incandescent light is around 3000-3500. Therefore depending on your camera setting some parts of your picture will be either urine yellow or blue.

Ещё сайты:
http://www.steves-digicams.com/
http://dcresource.com
Там ревью камер по-моему более толковые. И С-5000 там правда ругают за зерно.