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.
Problems:
Sensor image quality is a real noisefest. Which is a shame as the lens design is impeccable.
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.
Problems:
Sensor image quality is a real noisefest. Which is a shame as the lens design is impeccable.
