Olympus E-500 with 14-45mm lens

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49249269,00.htm

Reviewed 1 March 2006

Reviewed by Lisa Gidley

A well-designed compact 8-megapixel digital SLR camera, the Olympus E-500 offers a notably broad set of features for its class, including Olympus's signature dust-reduction system. Every time you turn on the E-500, its supersonic wave filter vibrates 35,000 times per second to shimmy dust off the CCD. With more fine-tuning tools than you might expect for the price, not to mention compatibility with Olympus's sharp Zuiko Digital lenses, this affordable model offers an appealing alternative to competitors such as the Nikon D50, the Canon EOS 350D, and the Pentax *ist DL.

Design
With a width of 127mm and a basic weight of 410g, the Olympus E-500 is one of the more compact digital SLR cameras available, but its sturdy plastic body doesn't feel cheap. As with most SLRs, an array of buttons and dials are spread about the body, but the general design is logical and easy to understand after a few uses. The camera's right-hand grip allows for an easy hold, but the contoured thumbrest on the upper-right side of the body's back isn't as generous as those on some similar SLRs.

Most features are accessible via a combination of the menu button, the mode dial and a four-way controller, though a few other functions have dedicated buttons. Unlike some similar cameras, the E-500 doesn't have a top-mounted status screen. Most of the data you need is found on the large 64mm LCD monitor on the camera's back. Peering into the viewfinder, you'll also see standard information such as your current aperture and shutter speed, as well as battery life, flash status and a few other settings.


The four-way controller gives you direct access to focus, white balance, metering and ISO settings, which you may want to change fairly frequently depending on your shooting conditions. The mode dial on top of the camera gives you a standard selection of shooting modes -- auto, program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority and manual, as well as automated scene modes for portraits, landscapes, sports, night portraits and close-ups. By combining the mode dial with the main menu, you can choose additional modes for unruly children, landscape portraits, candlelit scenes, high-key or low-key lighting situations, fireworks, sunrises and sunsets. This is an effective design that lets the most frequently used modes get top priority without obscuring the more specialised settings.

The Olympus E-500 uses the Four Thirds system lens mount, accepting Olympus Zuiko Digital lenses as well as third-party Four Thirds optics. The basic kit comes with a 14mm-to-45mm lens (28mm to 90mm, 35mm-film-camera equivalent). For about £60 more, you can also get a 40mm-to-150mm lens, equivalent to 80mm to 300mm, suitable for telephoto shooting. While the basic lens is certainly adequate for many shooting situations, the two lenses together are a good team.

Features
The Olympus E-500 has a strong set of features for its class. Its standard array of automatic and manual features is complemented by some distinctive elements. Most notable is Olympus's dust-reduction feature. The camera uses a supersonic wave filter to shake dust off the sensor at every start-up. While you still shouldn't change lenses in the middle of a sandstorm, this feature should help alleviate the digital scourge of bright, blown-out pixels resulting from dust within the camera body, a problem that becomes more common when you change lenses frequently.

The Olympus E-500 offers a nice range of colour-related features, in terms of both adjusting the white balance for available light and choosing the camera's general colour mode. You can manually adjust the colour temperature to compensate for red or blue casts, so if you're shooting in a situation with uncertain or mixed lighting, you can still find the ideal setting. The camera offers a basic array of general colour modes -- Vivid, Natural and the subtler Muted, as well as monochrome and sepia -- and lets you choose the standard sRGB colour space or the Adobe RGB colour space, depending on your postprocessing needs.

A fairly unusual setting is the gradation control, which lets you choose a high-key (favouring highlight detail), low-key (favouring shadow detail) or normal tonal range. The effects will vary depending on various scenes' lighting conditions.

The E-500 offers an ISO range from 100 to 1,600; raw, TIFF and JPEG capture modes with resolution up to 8 megapixels; exposure compensation from -5EV to 5EV; shutter speeds ranging from 60 seconds to 1/4,000 second, plus an eight-minute Bulb mode; noise reduction for longer exposures; five metering modes including highlight- and shadow-based spot meters; flash bracketing; a three-point autofocus system; manual-focus bracketing; continuous-shooting modes; a timer; in-camera saturation and sharpness adjustments and an antishock feature (mirror lockup) that flips the mirror prior to your exposure so that its movement doesn't blur your photos.

Performance
The Olympus E-500's playback mode gives you a wealth of data as you review your images. Colour histograms reveal the range of light and dark areas, and the camera highlights areas that are particularly overlit or mired in darkness. Due to the fact that the Olympus E-500 activates its dust-reduction feature every time you power up the camera, its start-up time is almost twice as slow as those of some of its competitors -- it took us an average of 2.6 seconds to fire our first shot from the time we turned it on. It has average speed in other tests. Shot-to-shot time with a small JPEG is 1.2 seconds, in raw mode it's 2.1 seconds and in TIFF mode it's 2.7 seconds. The autofocus performs very well, even in dim light. Shutter delay using autofocus is 0.3 seconds with a bright target and 0.4 seconds with a darker, lower-contrast target.

The Olympus E-500 comes with a BLM-1 lithium-ion rechargeable battery

In continuous-drive mode when shooting standard JPEG images, we measured an adequate capture rate of 2.5fps and you can shoot almost indefinitely until your card fills up. In TIFF or raw mode the number of continuous shots per burst drops to 5, but the speed is impressive at 2.6fps.

One feature that occasionally underperformed was the automatic white balance. The colour balance looked good for shots taken in sunlight or while using a flash, but photos taken in more challenging lighting situations, such as in the cool shade next to a building or indoors using artificial light, had significant colour casts if the flash wasn't used. For those lighting conditions, we recommend that users manually adjust the white-balance settings. If in doubt, shoot raw files so that you can adjust the white balance with raw-image-editing software later.

The Olympus E-500's 64mm LCD monitor is bright, sharp and colourful and it's also easy to view from a variety of angles. The optical viewfinder on the other hand is a bit small. It also has a notably short eye point of 16mm -- that's the maximum distance from the eyepiece at which the image looks sharp. We recommend picking up the ME-1 eyepiece magnifier that Olympus makes for the E-500, especially if you wear glasses as it really makes a noticeable difference.

The small built-in flash usually gave even lighting to a completely darkened room, but the standard flash setting was occasionally a bit overblown for close-up portraits. However, with the flash-bracketing functions and the ability to reduce the flash power, you can compensate for this.

Image quality
The Olympus E-500's images are generally excellent, particularly at the lower ISO ratings. In most shooting conditions our test photos showed nicely balanced colours, good sharpness, accurate automatic exposures and no visible purple fringing around details with contrast.

Our test images were clean and free of noticeable noise up to ISO 400. A handful of colourful speckles show up in dark areas at ISO 800, but even at that setting the highlights show little noise. Images shot at ISO 1,600 are fairly noisy, although the noise-reduction feature makes it less noticeable -- with the trade-off that shooting time is doubled.

Edited by Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by Kate Macefield