Olympus SP-500 UZ

Reviewed November 2005

Image Quality

The marketplace for mid-range digital cameras is incredibly competitive, and manufacturers have to be both creative and generous while being cost conscious in order to attract consumers. If one considers its technical specifications, the Olympus SP-500 UZ, a relatively compact and light camera, is positioned at a very reasonable price point.

This is a model that is clearly designed to appeal to consumers that value a powerful zoom more than the highest resolution currently available.

Even then, along with a 10X optical zoom, the SP-500 UZ offers a 6-megapixel resolution and a complete array of shooting modes. Moreover, it also includes a RAW image format — effectively a non-lossy compressed format that offers a great deal of control over the image quality — and adds to this a high resolution EVF, as well as a large 2.5-inch LCD monitor.

The 10X optical zoom of the SP-500 UZ, equivalent to a 38 to 380 mm, is clearly its most salient feature. And the quality of the lens that Olympus has used for a camera in this price range is almost irreproachable. Equipped with aspherical surfaces, the zoom is just about free of any distortion at either end of its range. Some barrel distortion is visible only when the Macro mode of the camera is used, and the subject is near and contains vertical or horizontal lines close to the edge of the frame. Likewise, it is only rarely that a slight chromatic aberration can be seen, even when the image contains very strong contrasts.

On the other hand, as is always the case with cameras that offer a long zoom but no stabilization system, care has to be exercised when the zoom is used at its maximum magnification. Indeed, to avoid an image blurred by camera shake — camera shake is amplified by the magnification of the zoom, much the same as when looking through binoculars — it is important to either stabilize the camera with a tripod, or ensure that the shutter speed is high enough to avoid blurring.

The colours the SP-500 UZ captures are generally excellent: well saturated, and more importantly, natural. The Auto white balance is quite reliable, and so is the default ESP metering pattern, which usually yields a correct exposure.

But, under some specific conditions — subjects that are backlit, or which contain very strong contrasts — experimenting with either the Centre-Weighted metering or with the Spot meter can yield better results.

Indeed, while the multi-area ESP metering of the SP-500 UZ gives a bit more importance to the brightness at the centre of the frame than to what is around it, we also noted that it seems to gives a slight edge to capturing detail in shadow areas and that this can occasionally entail a loss of detail in the highlights.

Overall the SP-500 UZ is not particularly sensitive to noise, and it only becomes noticeable at 200 ISO, although even at the highest level of 400 ISO the image can remain useable. At the lowest sensitivity of 80 ISO, noise is limited to deep shadows and usually only occurs when the ambient light conditions are less than ideal.

With daylight shots, the higher ISO settings can be used to boost the shutter speed, lessening the likelihood that the image will be ruined by camera shake when the zoom lens is at its maximum magnification.

The SP-500 UZ benefits from having a powerful built-in flash that has no problem lighting an average size room very evenly, whatever the zoom setting. And, for advanced users that either need or would appreciate having the capability, the SP-500 UZ can be made to function flawlessly with a remote slave flash.

As noted at the outset, Olympus includes a RAW format with the SP-500 UZ. And, although Olympus' RAW format could still benefit from better support through software, it offers the advantage of a non-lossy compressed format which can be processed post-capture using Olympus Master, the software bundled with the camera. RAW images are saved in approximately 7 seconds, making them more efficient than other non-compressed formats, and offer a flexibility that is out of the reach of the ubiquitous JPEG format.