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Timings & File SizesIn use the E-500 doesn't ever leave you waiting, with most operations carried out within about two seconds. My initial disappointment was that the camera doesn't have an 'instant on', instead there's a 1.7 second delay which includes the SSWF CCD clean (I've already commented on how I'd like to see this optimized). Sleep to on time is better at just under a second, so you could always leave the camera on with a short sleep time. Auto focus felt fast and responsive, shutter lag was very short and the E-500 always felt 'keen' to shoot. Media write speeds were good, especially with high performance cards such as the SanDisk Extreme III. Timing Notes: All times calculated as an average of three operations. Unless otherwise stated all timings were made on a 3264 x 2448 JPEG HQ 1/8 (approx. 1,800 KB per image). The media used for these tests were:
Continuous Drive modeTo test continuous mode the camera had the following settings: Manual Focus, Manual Exposure (1/200 sec, F5.6), ISO 200. Measurements were taken from audio recordings of the tests. Media used were the same as above. Unlike many other digital SLR's the E-500 does not continue shooting once its buffer is full, instead you need to release the shutter release button and re-press it. Hence there is no 'Buffer full rate' measurement for this camera. The tests carried out below measured the following results for JPEG and RAW:
Burst of JPEG HQ (1/8) images
Burst of RAW images
The E-500's continuous shooting rate is right in the middle of the average speed for affordable digital SLR's (between 2.5 and 3.0 fps). What's impressive is the unlimited shooting capability in JPEG HQ mode when using a fast CF card. Here both the SanDisk Extreme III and Lexar Pro 80x cards achieve this. Less dramatic is the buffering capability of JPEG images on slower cards and RAW images on all cards, around 15 JPEG's or 4 RAW's. File Flush TimingTimings shown below are the time taken for the camera to process and "flush" the image out to the storage card. Timing was taken from the instant the shutter release was pressed to the time the storage card activity indicator beside the storage compartment went out. Writing appears to begin approximately half a second after the shutter release is pressed, writing continues 'in the background' and doesn't affect any camera function. Media used were the same as above.
As you can see there is a pretty stark difference between the performance of xD-Picture Card and Compact Flash. The SanDisk Extreme III Compact Flash card was over four times faster than xD-Picture Card when writing a RAW+JPEG pair. Between the Compact Flash cards the Extreme III and Lexar Pro 80x were the fastest. The graphs below clearly demonstrate the difference between xD and CF for the E-500, in my opinion you'd really only want to use xD as a backup in case your CF fills. One performance in these completely threw out the scale of these graphs and that was a burst of RAW files written to the SanDisk Extreme III card. At 9,854 KB/sec this is one of the fastest in-camera write speeds we've measured. Card performance: JPEG Fine continuous burst write
Card performance: RAW continuous burst write
Cardbus 32-bit Adapter benchmark
Battery lifeThe E-500 uses the same Olympus BLM-1 Lithium-Ion battery we saw in the E-1, E-300 and C-8080, it delivers 1500 mAh at 7.2V (10.8 Wh). Olympus quote battery life as approximately 400 shots, while we found no reason to disagree with this it isn't clear if this measurement was made with the 'Control Panel' information display shown on the LCD monitor or not. Having the LCD monitor on all of the time will obviously be more of a drain on the battery than a camera with a separate information LCD panel. Alternatively you can use the LBH-1 Lithium battery holder which takes three CR123A batteries, useful as an emergency backup. |
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