Olympus E-500 with 14-45mm lens review

The Olympus E-500 comes with a BLM-1 lithium-ion rechargeable battery

In continuous-drive mode when shooting standard JPEG images, we measured an adequate capture rate of 2.5fps and you can shoot almost indefinitely until your card fills up. In TIFF or raw mode the number of continuous shots per burst drops to 5, but the speed is impressive at 2.6fps.

One feature that occasionally underperformed was the automatic white balance. The colour balance looked good for shots taken in sunlight or while using a flash, but photos taken in more challenging lighting situations, such as in the cool shade next to a building or indoors using artificial light, had significant colour casts if the flash wasn't used. For those lighting conditions, we recommend that users manually adjust the white-balance settings. If in doubt, shoot raw files so that you can adjust the white balance with raw-image-editing software later.

The Olympus E-500's 64mm LCD monitor is bright, sharp and colourful and it's also easy to view from a variety of angles. The optical viewfinder on the other hand is a bit small. It also has a notably short eye point of 16mm -- that's the maximum distance from the eyepiece at which the image looks sharp. We recommend picking up the ME-1 eyepiece magnifier that Olympus makes for the E-500, especially if you wear glasses as it really makes a noticeable difference.

The small built-in flash usually gave even lighting to a completely darkened room, but the standard flash setting was occasionally a bit overblown for close-up portraits. However, with the flash-bracketing functions and the ability to reduce the flash power, you can compensate for this.

Image quality
The Olympus E-500's images are generally excellent, particularly at the lower ISO ratings. In most shooting conditions our test photos showed nicely balanced colours, good sharpness, accurate automatic exposures and no visible purple fringing around details with contrast.

Our test images were clean and free of noticeable noise up to ISO 400. A handful of colourful speckles show up in dark areas at ISO 800, but even at that setting the highlights show little noise. Images shot at ISO 1,600 are fairly noisy, although the noise-reduction feature makes it less noticeable -- with the trade-off that shooting time is doubled.

Edited by Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by Kate Macefield