Olympus SP-310

Opinion: A camera is only as good as the image it takes.

The lens is astonishly well built. And there's no purple fringing I can see. This I loved.

The construction is well done. For plastic.

Color saturation is very good.

The inbuilt flash is acceptable.

The camera is very easy to use for beginners or pros. The inclusion of so many controls and settings suggests Olympus is selling this to prosumers...

...But the amount of image noise is unacceptably high. It renders the RAW format POINTLESS when you're looking at more noise grain than salt spilt from its shaker!! 100ISO on this thing is comparable to 400ISO on a film camera, as far as I'm concerned. And the cost of the camera ($350) means you need to buy and develop over 800 film images before you make up the price difference. (using Fuji Reala 100... using a typical off-the-shelf 400ISO film, the amount of pics to take would more than double!)

In short, no prosumer would even want to consider this overpriced toy.

My Sony Mavica CD500 that recently died, a 5mp camera, had far less noise than this model, a 7mp camera! How dare a three YEAR old camera outperform a brand spankin' new model in terms of image quality? This is a joke on the consumer, pure and simple.

Forget Olympus, they're playing the megapixel game on you. Don't fall for it.

Here is a comparison of the noise. Guess which one is the Olympus? (I used virtually no compression as I did not want to exaggerate how bad the Olympus is.)

i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/flibble72/noise.jpg (add in the h t t p : / / prefix before the i4 when copying it into the address bar)

The one on the left is the Sony. A bit on the cool side, but the noise isn't as chaotic and blends in very well. The Olympus gets the color tone right but the noise is garish and atrocious. While not as easily seen in a real picture, it's still there and noise removal procedures only hamper the sharpness.

Opinion: This camera "eats" batteries. Went through three sets of 2200 & 2300 mAh ni-mh batteries in less than an hour and a half. Used only the optical viewfinder in an attempt make a difference. Did not help. Note the November 21st review in this forum. Several of the LCD menu examples show a red, low battery life indicator. Three of them in just one page.

Returned the camera.

Opinion: I LOVE my SP-310.

Its a wonderful camera, extremely light, compact, has LCD and an viewfinder BOTH in such a compact form factor. Uses standard AA batteries is a HUGE plus, since a proprietary battery is a major concern in my SD300.

Image quality is at par (if not better) than the canon cameras! Oly has a firmware upgrade available which resolves the noise issues. Make sure you do it if you're facing that problem.

The flash is very strong and was able to light almost all objects in an entirely dark landscape till the range of 15'.

All in all, I am planning to keep this camera for a very long time unless I lose it or break it apart ;).

Opinion: The SP-310 has excellent picture quality, with AUTO mode, full manual control including focus. The iso200 images are very good and iso400 is very usable (better than iso400 on my 4 MPixel Nikon cp4500) . The 2.5" LCD is very nice, but on the ski slope you will use the optical viewfinder instead. The menu system is excellent, but deep. Once you settle on your preferred camera configuration, it can be saved in MyMode 1 through 4. Very compact, not as small as my Minolta X20, but all key functions can be controlled with the right hand alone. One of the neater features is the interval mode: The camera will shoot up to 99 pictures, separated by up to 99 minutes (programable). I use it to take star constellation pictures, which are then co-registered using the free IRIS software.

Revisit after 3 months and over 1000 pictures:

Excellent camera.

If you use the SP310 as P/S in Auto you miss most of its good features, but you have to read the manual. Most of my pictures are now taking using the bracketing (BKT) mode set to -0.7, 0, +0. EV with SQ1 (3.4 MPixel). Each picture is about 0.6 Mbytes. In BKT they are taken at 0.2, 1.4 and 2.4 seconds after shutter release. This setting is saved as MyMode1. Very handy.

There are cases in very bright outdoors conditions, when the LCD is almost unreadable, but that is when I can fall back on the optical viewfinder. (Note the complaints with LCD only cameras elsewhere on the DPReview forums).

Very nice results at iso400. The camera does little noise suppression on its own, which is good, since the free(NeatImage) and commercial noise reduction programs work better than even the best in-camera software. Images intentionally underexpose by one stop in iso400 (i.e. effectively shot at iso800) can be corrected in PhotoShop with very reasonable results.

Revisit after 7 month. The picture counter is approaching 5000 photos taken while traveling on three continents.
99% of the pictures are technically excellent (i.e. well exposed and focused). Wish 1% were good pictures, rather than photo diary quality, but this is not the camera's fault. Very nice camera with all the manual controls the few time it is needed in a very compact picture at an incredible price (under $200 August 2006).