Olympus SP-510 UZ

Reviewed October 2006

Image Quality

Nowadays, amateur photographers that want to have the greatest possible range in their equipment to be able to handle all photographic opportunities have a choice: purchase a digital reflex camera, at least a couple of lenses, and a decent size camera bag to carry the lot, or purchase a light and compact Bridge camera.

Bridge cameras usually offer a long powerful zoom lens, a TTL viewfinder that is most often electronic, a complete range of capture modes, including priority modes and a manual mode, and a group of scene modes. Moreover, these are cameras that are generally much more flexible than standard compacts, offering capabilities that parallel those of SLR cameras.

The zoom lens of the SP-510 UZ has good optical characteristics: it covers a useful focal length range that starts at 38 mm and extends to 380 mm (35 mm equivalent), has very little barrel distortion at the wide end, and no pincushion at the telephoto end. In addition, images are uniformly sharp at all focal lengths, including at the widest angle.

Similarly, chromatic aberration is minimal, including at the wide angle end, and negligible in the corners, even when there are strong contrasts.

Unlike many other long zoom cameras, the SP-510 UZ is not equipped with an optical stabilizer. Instead, it has a digital image stabilization system that increases ISO sensitivity to maximize the shutter speed, thereby avoiding camera shake. The system can push ISO sensitivity up to 1250 ISO if necessary. While the system is fairly effective outdoors, results are less positive indoors. While the noise in images is acceptable up to 200 ISO, it is already detectable in shadows at 100 ISO.

Beyond 400 ISO noise is omnipresent, and images captured at the highest sensitivities look pixelated. Sensitivity can be pushed even further, to 2500 and 4000 ISO with an image size limited to 2048 x 1536, but the resulting images are very noisy, and look blotchy.

Outdoors and using the default settings, the SP-510 UZ yields colours that are natural and not over-saturated. The Auto white balance is effective and it is only when photos are captured under artificial light that the white balance presets need to be used. Furthermore, the One-Touch white balance is quick and able to handle odd mixes of light sources, ensuring colour fidelity.

Likewise, the default ESP metering pattern of the SP-510 UZ yields well-exposed images and it is rare to have to use one of the other patterns.

The SP-510 UZ not only offers a JPEG format with two levels of compression, it also offers a RAW format. As always, the RAW format is the unprocessed image as it comes from the CCD, saved along with its shooting parameters. It can be deciphered by the software Olympus includes with the camera, and by other more advanced image editing software.

The RAW format offers access to the highest image quality that can be obtained with the SP-510 UZ. Its drawback, however, is that it takes around 7 seconds to save the image.

Although two levels are available when using the JPEG format, the least compressed format, SHQ, tends to lessen the amount of detail in the images — an effect that can be observed when images are looked at full size on a monitor — and can accentuate noise when it is present.

In conclusion, the SP-510 UZ brings ergonomic improvements over the SP-500 through the addition of external controls that make it simpler to change settings, and which avoid having to navigate through the menu. It also offers an increase in resolution, adding an extra million pixels, but that comes at a cost, as the SP-510 UZ is noticeably more prone to noise than its predecessor was.