Olympus EVOLT E-520

Reviewed December 2008

Introduction

Although its physical proportions mirror other compact DSLRs in the market, this 10 megapixel offering is much lighter than many. That's partly due to its use of Four Thirds technology. That technology was built from the roots up for digital SLRs. As a result, they have smaller lenses that weigh less than those found in more conventional mirrorcams.

Lightness isn't the only drawing card for pocketshooters. With its Live View feature, pictures can be framed and shot through the unit's bright, sharp, 2.7-inch LCD.

What's more, setting changes can be previewed on the screen before the shot is taken. Before you take a shot, you can see what will happen if you change the White Balance from sunny to cloudy or move exposure compensation in a plus or minus direction.

Better yet, you don't have to jump through hoops to use Live View. Press a button and Bam! you're there. And once there, everything works as if you were using the camera's viewfinder. Partially depress the shutter button, and the DSC locks in a focus and exposure setting. Turn a dial and you can increase or decrease the aperture for the shot, or change the shutter speed for it. It's the kind of transparent operation that the Pockerazzi love so much about their point-and-shoot cameras.

Another feature borrowed by the E-520 from the pocketcam's repertoire is panorama photography. However, this feature requires more guesswork with this hardware than it does in the point-and-shoot world. Ordinarily, when you take a shot in a panorama sequence, the transparent edge of that shot appears at the edge of the LCD. As you move the camera to set up the next shot in the sequence, you can easily overlap the beginning of the new shot with the end of the old by using the transparent sliver as a guide. The E-520 displays guides at the sides of its LCD in panorama mode, but it doesn't display the transparent sliver. That means you have to guess at where the shots should overlap in the panorama, and it makes using the feature a real test of visual memory.

What's good about the E-520 is the amount of choice it gives a photographer. It's also what's bad about the camera.

It's great to have three auto bracketing modes. You can auto bracket by exposure, by flash intensity and by White Balance.

It's also nice to have multiple image stabilization modes. In addition to a normal IS mode, there's a mode that turns off horizontal stabilization while preserving vertical stabilization to create blurred backgrounds while panning on a moving object and a mode that turns off vertical stabilization while preserving horizontal stabilization to blur the background while following an object in a vertical plane.

And it's diverting to have three spot metering modes where most cameras have just one. There's a normal spot mode, one for controlling highlights where a subject in shot against a bright background and one for controlling shadows when a subject is shot against a dark background.

But some menus for the camera go three levels deep, which can be tedious when you don't have a mouse to click away at those nested levels of information.

Moreover, the digcam has so many size and quality combinations for its images, it takes two sets of menus to create a working configuration.

Fortunately, most of the frequently used functions for the camera can be accessed through controls on its body or its very powerful Super Control Panel. The panel can be called up with the press of a button and, in addition to giving you important information about the camera's current operating status, it let's you change just about anything you need to change about a shot on the fly.

While the marriage of simplicity and complexity in the E-520 may not be an entirely smooth one, it's one that makes the snapper a very attractive camera for the transitional photographer who wants to leave point-and-shoot land behind but not lose sight of its shores entirely.