Digital Trends

Olympus SP-510UZ

October 30th, 2006 | by David Elrich

Performance

Startup is no problem with this 2006 digicam. In less than 2 seconds, the lens extends and the LCD screen springs to life. As usual, I started shooting in Auto with digital image stabilization engaged and at maximum JPEG resolution (3072 x 2304 pixels). The 512MB card holds 98 of these images, dropping down to half that when shooting in RAW. It was a brisk day so I decided to see if the SP-510UZ could handle some vivid Fall colors, then moved indoors to see how the Bright Capture Technology handled shooting in available light. You can actually use an ISO 4000 setting--D-SLRs usually top out at 3200—but in this case resolution drops to 3-megapixels instead of 10. More on this in a bit.

The Olympus SP-510UZ is comfortable to handle and shooting in a variety of angles is simple. What’s not so great is the LCD screen; there’s blur as it tries to zero in on the subject. In fact, the screen is very poor, not revealing the true colors of what you’re shooting. When I did some quick reviews I thought had taken a load of bum photos—when they were transferred to the computer and shown on screen, it was an entirely different story. Another problem is overall speed. This camera will not win the Daytona 500 of digicams. It really seems to be breathing hard saving the files. And start twiddling your thumbs waiting for a RAW file to be saved (it’s about 8-10 seconds or so). Using this camera for a still life in RAW might be a reasonable task but forget about shooting the kids playing football. Another issue was auto focus; like its predecessor, the camera drifted a bit before locking in. Again this is annoying, something photographers shouldn’t have to deal with in this day and age. Note: you can’t use the RAW setting in Auto; you have to go into one of the manual modes (P, A/S, M) which is good because the average point-and-shooter wouldn’t use RAW on a bet (simply too much effort required). Within the manual settings, there are loads of adjustments but there’s definitely a learning curve to get your hands around them all.

After filling the xD Picture card a few times, it was time to make some prints to check the results. After cranking out many full-bleed 8.5x11s, it was time to make a judgment. First off, you’re probably wondering how an image taken with ISO 4000 looks. In a word, terrible but it would be foolish to think a $329 point-and-shoot digicam could actually capture a quality image at that setting. Worse still, noise reared its ugly head at ISO 200 and at 400 it was much worse. If you buy this camera, don’t push the ISO at all—leave it on Auto.

In general the camera did a decent job outdoors in good sunlight. Focusing was fairly quick and the prints were reasonably accurate. Colors in some instances were a bit muddy, though. As for the indoor images, they were much worse with loads of noise and colors that didn’t resemble real life. The camera had trouble focusing subjects that didn’t have sharp edges.

Image Courtesy of Olympus