Olympus SP-510 UZ review

We remember a time when Olympus was well known for its well-featured superzoom cameras. When the company changed its naming conventions recently, its crop of superzooms was cut to only the 6-megapixel SP-500 UZ, which has now been joined by the 7.1-megapixel SP-510 UZ.

The SP-510 UZ looks impressive on paper, with a boatload of features, including manual exposure controls and a 10x optical zoom lens, but a lack of optical image stabilisation and unusually high noise mar this camera's outlook. Add to that the fact that cameras such as Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-H2 and DSC-H5 and Canon's excellent PowerShot S3 IS, all sport 12x lenses and yield lower noise, and this Olympus will probably have a hard time in the shops this autumn.

Design
Like most superzooms, the SP-510 UZ has a chunky body with an SLR-style grip on the right side and a pretty big lens on the front, which extends when you turn the power on and has a rubber grip around it to help you hold on while shooting with two hands.

All the control buttons are within reach of your thumb or fingers, so one-handed shooting is possible. Some of the buttons are small, but they are responsive and well placed, so that once you memorise where each one is, you shouldn't have trouble pressing them without looking. One of those buttons lets you switch between the electronic viewfinder (EVF) and the 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen. It's worth noting that, unlike some EVF cameras, you can't have both the EVF and LCD on at the same time.

The menus are intuitive and use a nifty graphical interface to shift between setup, image quality and camera menus, the last of which includes functions that you can also access through the OK/function button on the keypad, such as white balance, ISO, drive mode and metering. We like the duplication, since the function button provides quick access to the most important settings while shooting, and since the camera menu has everything, it's a great resource if you can't find a setting. It might be nice to offer a menu view that eliminates these duplicates so that you could make the camera menu shorter once you're used to the camera's button layout.

Also, since there are so many menu levels and pressing the menu button backs out one level at a time, it can take a while to reverse all the way out. We counted five presses of the menu button after we changed the drive mode to bracket across three exposures. It might be nice for Olympus to design a way to jump out of the menus with one button press. To the company's credit, if you press the shutter button while you're in the menu, you can still take a picture, and the camera returns you to the menu exactly where you left off, so you don't have to miss a shot just because you're trying to change a setting.

Four AA batteries provide power and find their home inside the camera grip. Like most Olympus cameras, the SP-510 UZ records images to xD picture cards.

Features
Olympus's SP-510 UZ has an impressive list of features, though some of the most important ones can't quite keep up with the competition. Its lens is definitely high quality, including the same type of extra-low dispersion and aspherical lens elements found in the company's SLR lenses, but at 10x optical zoom, spanning 38mm-to-380mm (35mm equivalent), it neither keeps up with the 12x zooms offered by most of its competitors, nor allows the useful wide angle that we'd become accustomed to with the company's old C-8080, C-7070 and C-5060 wide zoom cameras.

Optional conversion lenses, including 0.7x wide and 1.7x telephoto versions, help overcome this problem, but few people tend to use these lenses. To Olympus's credit, the lens is fast -- its maximum aperture spans f/2.8 to f/3.7 across its zoom range, which matches its competitors' offerings and should help somewhat in low-light situations.

Worse than the wide-angle woe is this camera's lack of optical image stabilisation. For a superzoom in this day and age, this is inexcusable, especially considering that the company includes it in its Stylus 750. Olympus tries to skirt the issue by touting Digital Image Stabilisation, but all this does is boost the ISO so that you can shoot at a faster shutter speed. If not for this camera's noise issues (see below), this wouldn't be too bad, but a lack of optical image stabilisation would still seem strange.