Olympus E-30

	Playback Summary
• Decent array of editing tools • Fully-featured but slow and responsive software
	Sample Photos	Page 8 of 19	Hardware

Playback Mode (6.75)

In playback mode, you can zoom in on images up to 14x, or out to 4, 9, 16, 25, 49 or 100 thumbnails, and then out even further to calendar view. Both the front and back dial handle magnification duties, and the four-way controller scrolls around the image, so there is no way to move between images at the same zoom level. When at 1x zoom, the up and down buttons jump forward or back ten images at a time.

If you press the […] button on the camera's rear, you can access lightbox mode, which lets you compare two images at a time. These can be controlled independently or concurrently to set zoom level and scroll around the image. The ± (exposure compensation) button will rotate the image, if you want to change it quickly, though the camera will auto-rotate images taken in portrait orientation. In the playback menu is a fairly rudimentary slideshow function, where you can chose how many images to show at once in accordance with the various number of thumbnails discussed above. There are no fancy fades or musical interludes, which is fine with us.

Pressing the INFO button alters the display during playback. As shown above, these cycle through image only, simple shooting info, full information with four histograms, brightness histogram or shadow/highlight.

In-Camera Editing (4.25)

While no replacement for a computer and a competent user of Photoshop, the E-30 has some basic editing tools built in, and one slightly unusual one. For the standard suspects, there's shadow adjust for dark images, red-eye fix, cropping, black and white and sepia modes and saturation adjustment. The image can also be resized or cropped to one of the multitude of aspect ratios supported by this camera (4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 6:6, 5:4, 7:6, 6:5, 7:5, or 3:4). The interesting editing feature is image overlay (which can also be done while shooting if you don't want to stack images after you're done shooting). Using RAW files, up to four pictures can be overlaid on one another, with the gain manually shifted from 0.1 to 2.0. If you want to overlay more than four images, just create two separate composites, and then combine the resulting files.

Software (4.00)

The only software that came bundled with the camera is Olympus Master 2, though a demo of Olympus Studio 2, the company's higher-end editing and workflow tool, is also included. Master 2 runs on both PCs and Macs.

Software
	Olympus Master 2 Olympus Master 2 is a combined image editing and organizing application. >From this you can upload to perform slideshows, resize, add text, tweak image curves as well as sharpness and colors. It's pretty fully featured, if a bit confusingly laid out. It's not hugely fast either, but will do for the basics in a pinch.

Direct Print Options (3.00)

As with almost every camera currently on the market, the Olympus E-30 handles both types of direct printing: DPOF and PictBridge. If you know your printing setup, you can specify the DPI of the eventual print-out in advance.

Direct Print Options
	DPOF With Direct Print Order Form, you can tag one or all of your photos to be printed at a later date, and you just hand your memory card over to a print professional.
	PictBridge By hooking your camera directly to compatible printers via USB, you can choose which images to print, what size to print them at, whether or not you want borders, or output a proof sheet to see all your images at once.