Olympus E-500 with 14-45mm lens review

The Olympus E-500 uses the Four Thirds system lens mount, accepting Olympus Zuiko Digital lenses as well as third-party Four Thirds optics. The basic kit comes with a 14mm-to-45mm lens (28mm to 90mm, 35mm-film-camera equivalent). For about £60 more, you can also get a 40mm-to-150mm lens, equivalent to 80mm to 300mm, suitable for telephoto shooting. While the basic lens is certainly adequate for many shooting situations, the two lenses together are a good team.

Features
The Olympus E-500 has a strong set of features for its class. Its standard array of automatic and manual features is complemented by some distinctive elements. Most notable is Olympus's dust-reduction feature. The camera uses a supersonic wave filter to shake dust off the sensor at every start-up. While you still shouldn't change lenses in the middle of a sandstorm, this feature should help alleviate the digital scourge of bright, blown-out pixels resulting from dust within the camera body, a problem that becomes more common when you change lenses frequently.

The Olympus E-500 uses CompactFlash type I and II storage cards, as well as xD-Picture Card media

The Olympus E-500 offers a nice range of colour-related features, in terms of both adjusting the white balance for available light and choosing the camera's general colour mode. You can manually adjust the colour temperature to compensate for red or blue casts, so if you're shooting in a situation with uncertain or mixed lighting, you can still find the ideal setting. The camera offers a basic array of general colour modes -- Vivid, Natural and the subtler Muted, as well as monochrome and sepia -- and lets you choose the standard sRGB colour space or the Adobe RGB colour space, depending on your postprocessing needs.

A fairly unusual setting is the gradation control, which lets you choose a high-key (favouring highlight detail), low-key (favouring shadow detail) or normal tonal range. The effects will vary depending on various scenes' lighting conditions.

The E-500 offers an ISO range from 100 to 1,600; raw, TIFF and JPEG capture modes with resolution up to 8 megapixels; exposure compensation from -5EV to 5EV; shutter speeds ranging from 60 seconds to 1/4,000 second, plus an eight-minute Bulb mode; noise reduction for longer exposures; five metering modes including highlight- and shadow-based spot meters; flash bracketing; a three-point autofocus system; manual-focus bracketing; continuous-shooting modes; a timer; in-camera saturation and sharpness adjustments and an antishock feature (mirror lockup) that flips the mirror prior to your exposure so that its movement doesn't blur your photos.

Performance
The Olympus E-500's playback mode gives you a wealth of data as you review your images. Colour histograms reveal the range of light and dark areas, and the camera highlights areas that are particularly overlit or mired in darkness. Due to the fact that the Olympus E-500 activates its dust-reduction feature every time you power up the camera, its start-up time is almost twice as slow as those of some of its competitors -- it took us an average of 2.6 seconds to fire our first shot from the time we turned it on. It has average speed in other tests. Shot-to-shot time with a small JPEG is 1.2 seconds, in raw mode it's 2.1 seconds and in TIFF mode it's 2.7 seconds. The autofocus performs very well, even in dim light. Shutter delay using autofocus is 0.3 seconds with a bright target and 0.4 seconds with a darker, lower-contrast target.