Olympus SP-510 UZ review

Image quality
At its best, the SP-510 UZ can capture images with abundant detail and accurate-looking, well-saturated colours, with only very minor JPEG artefacting and little or no fringing. The camera's automatic white balance did an admirable job of serving up neutral colours under our lab's tungsten lights. Interestingly, the tungsten preset was less neutral, with a slight bluish-green cast. So, you may as well stick with auto white balance when shooting indoors or outdoors, where it did just as good a job of producing neutral colours when shooting in natural daylight.

Unfortunately, noise became a major issue starting at ISO 400. Even at ISO 50, images from the SP-510UZ weren't as clean as images we've seen from most competitors, though they'd be more than acceptable for most users. While also very usable at ISO 100, noise began to creep in, especially in darker colours, and shadow, manifesting itself mostly as blotchy off-colour blobs, rather than the finer, snowy noise that some cameras produce. ISO 200 yielded noticeable noise, which began to steal the sharpness from finer details. The small hash marks on our test scene's tape measure began to blur, but we could still distinguish one mark from its neighbour at 100 per cent magnification in Photoshop.

At ISO 400, multicoloured speckles blanketed our images. Though the hash marks remained distinct, most users would be disappointed with prints any larger than 100x150mm. At ISO 800, things only got worse, all detail in the tape measure blurred away, and most detail in darker parts of our scene were lost. At ISO 1,600, images were unusable. In an attempt to make ISO 2,500 and ISO 4,000 more palatable, Olympus decreased the resolution to 3.1 megapixels. This didn't help. Our images at ISO 2,500 and ISO 4,000 were also unusable, unless you like the impressionist-painterly effect these high-sensitivity settings produced.

If not for this camera's unfortunate noise and performance issues, its many convenient and well-thought-out features, despite a few omissions, would make this an impressive superzoom. As it is, we can't really recommend the SP-510 UZ in the face of competitors such as Sony's DSC-H2 and DSC-H5 and Canon's PowerShot S3 IS. To be fair, the Olympus SP-510 UZ does cost less than those other cameras, so if you absolutely can't afford one of them, you may want to take a look at this Olympus, but you'd be better served by splashing out.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide