Again a small review of one of the camera’s I own. The Olympus E-510 a small 4/3 dslr.
The camera
This is a great, yet small, 10 megapixel dslr camera. It handles really well and the quality of the kit lenses is very good. It is a great camera to take on a trip because of the small size. The grip on the camera is wonderfull and the camera holds much better than the E-4xx series by Olympus which have almost no grip but of course they are also a bit smaller. The camera accepts XD cards by olympus and the more standard Compact Flash cards.
The downsides
I have been working with this camera for quite a while now and I can say that there are a few, lets say, downsides, to this camera: The white balance, the contrast handling, the lcd display and live-view. Nothing BIG really but still so you know:
• The white balance is not always very accurate when on auto mode. This can be helped to put the camera on a preset that fits the colortemperature or you can measure the correct whitebalance yourself.
• The contrast handling of this camera could be slightly better. Highlights will be blown if you shoot high contrast scenes and your exposure is a bit too generous. So better underexpose slightly or use a flash to minimize the contrasts. It is not great but I can live with it.
• The quality of the lcd display is a bit dissapointing when viewing images on camera. It doesn’t really matter but it could be much better.
• Live view is ok but only useable in studio situations.
Noise filtering and Sharpness
Burried deep into the menusystem you will find the Noise filtering setting. It can be set to one of four positions: Off, Low, Standard, and High; I really prefer to put this setting to Off. When you turn it off it will result in much more detail and sharpness in your images. Of course you get a little noise but really for me it looks much better. Maybe you should put it to Low or Standard for ISO settings higher than 400 but else leave it Off you will gain a lot!
Conclusion
The great thing about this camera is that it has built-in image-stabilization which means that whatever lens you put on, it will be stabilized. It also has a very good dust filtering system. Furthermore the quality of this camera is just very good. Because of the fourthirds sensor this camera is pretty small and you can carry it around all day. My conclusion: If you know its weak points and know how to deal with them this is a great little DSLR.
Below an excerpt of an interesting piece I read on techradar.com:
So are compact system cameras really the way forward? Were Olympus’s DSLRs really so bad?
Presumably, if enough had been sold they’d still be with us. But it didn’t help that endless carping over sensor sizes and pixel counts, mostly from those who’d never picked one up and used it, mean that Olympus DSLRs were often seen as the poor relation to APS-C format cameras.
This was the point; you did actually have to use them. The Olympus E-series DSLRs had a tight, light, precise feel that rival SLRs lacked then and still lack now. They were a lot better in this respect than, dare we say it, Olympus’s current PEN-series cameras.
Image shot with Olympus E-510:
