Olympus SP-510UZ Review
Digital SLR cameras are becoming increasingly more affordable but manufacturers are still bringing out ‘bridge cameras’ such as the Olympus SP-510UZ. A ‘bridge camera’ is a digital camera which isn’t SLR but acts like an SLR camera. For the average camera user this is a good thing as it keeps the price down and still produces quite good quality photos and short movies..
The SP-510UZ boasts about its 10x optical zoom and 7.1 megapixels for the cheap RRP of £200 but what interested me was that it had a maximum ISO of 4000, achievable by using BrightCapture technology. Along with the camera you also get a 2 year warranty which is always useful to have.
Once I picked up the camera the first thing I noticed was its chunky feel, but it has grip on the lens barrel and the side stops it from being too awkward to hold, even if your moving around a lot its less likely to fall out of your hands.
When you turn on the SP-510UZ it only takes moments to power up, which is good if you see something and need to take a fast picture. Pictures can either be taken via the screen or the electronic viewfinder with a dedicated button to switch between them in a hurry, for example if the sun glares on the screen you can quickly switch to the viewfinder mode by pressing this button.
Once I had used the camera for a while I had noticed that the ISO of 4000 that excited me while buying the camera is only true if you use the 3 megapixel mode in the camera, which was disappointing. The full 7.1 megapixels are only available with an ISO of 1600, which is still okay but not what I had expected when I bought the camera. Likewise the fine zoom option which will zoom into 15x will reduce the image to a 3 megapixel image as it crops, which is slightly disappointing but personally I hardly ever use the fine zoom, the 10x zoom is more than enough in most situations.
The guide function of the camera is quite useful as it adjusts the settings on the camera for different situations if you are not sure which settings to use, for example when shooting into backlight it will adjust the settings so you get a much clearer image.
The internal memory of the camera can only hold 4 highest quality JPEG’s so I would recommend investing in an additional xD card to put in the camera, even a 512Mb card would be sufficient for most users, but if you insist on only taking the highest quality images you can then I would advise getting the biggest card you can afford as they do take up a lot of memory.
Overall this camera is good for an everyday point and click camera and with all the extra features (you can even use it as an alarm if you wanted to) it is really worth it at this price.
12.02.2008. 12:43
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