Digital Trends

Olympus SP-500 December 12th, 2005 | by David Elrich

Performance

The SP-500UZ powers up very quickly; it's about two seconds for the lens to extend and your subject to appear on the LCD. This is fairly typical for 2005 edition digicams and manufacturers are to be thanked for eliminating this annoying issue. As a 6-megapixel camera, the camera doesn't have to labor saving huge files to the card expect when you're in RAW. The camera has a burst mode of 1.75 frames per second for a max of three frames in JPEG; forget a burst in RAW but that's really the domain of more expensive D-SLRs.

I look a variety of shots indoors and out moving from Auto and then to the Scene Modes. Olympus offers 21 of them ranging from portrait to documents and even auction for eBay shots. The onscreen menu shows an example of scene it should be used for and even offers a text explanation. This is a great example of terrific user friendliness. An even better example of user friendliness would be a macro button on the camera itself, rather than using the menu system but you don't find that here. The camera also has the usual aperture- and shutter priority modes plus the ability to save custom settings. Unfortunately, the basic manual doesn't give the newbie user even a clue how to use them; you have to go into the advanced manual on the CD ROM. This was bad news after such a bright start with the Scene modes.

You can put up with these annoyances if the camera takes good photos after all is said and done. The results of the Olympus SP-500UZ were mixed at best. As always I print images directly from the card to a Canon Pixma MP780 printer via my Dell desktop without any editing—just straight borderless 8.5x11 prints on Canon Photo Paper Plus Semi Gloss. A sunset shot in “sunset mode” came out nicely but a close-up of trees against a blue sky in “landscape” was just O.K. with hints of purple fringing. (These were SHQ JPEGs.) While I was shooting (inside and out) I noticed the camera had a tendency to search for the proper focus while in Auto and some macro shots were total misfires. Others came out just right. Digital noise did not rear its ugly head until ISO 200 (400 is the max setting) but this is fairly typical with today's compact digicams. At 80 and 100 it was not an issue. Response time (saving to the card) was fast and recycling times with the flash were good but this uneven focusing with an unresponsive shutter was annoying. The 10x optical zoom on the other hand offers a very usable range but I'd still like it wider than 38mm but that's just me.

Switching to RAW was even more of challenge for the camera. Don't expect to take a series of shots of your child skiing with this one. The camera flashes “busy” for several seconds as it saves the big files. Still the results are worth it for landscapes and other static shots. As noted, Olympus provides software to develop the RAW files and you can adjust contrast, sharpness, saturation, color temperature and exposure compensation when you develop them. Olympus is to be commended for this. That said I was happy with the quality but this is no D-SLR.

As noted, the 2.5-inch LCD is rated only 115K pixels and the screen is useable in most lighting conditions. Images tended to blur on the LCD screen. With direct sunlight, I just moved to the viewfinder not bothering to go into the menu to make adjustments. Another downer was the movie mode. Recording 320 x 240 pixels at 30 frames per second is weak compared to so many other cameras with 640 x 480 at 30fps. On the plus side of the ledger battery life was excellent even with standard alkalines.

Image Courtesy of Olympus America