Olympus E-620

	Design & Handling Summary
• Small camera body means very good portability, maneuvering challenges for large-handed shooters • Backlit controls aid in night shooting • Some buttons are small and don't extend far enough from the camera body • Extensive customization options for camera controls • Menu system unattractive but serviceable • Manual intimidating to newcomers, poorly indexed for experienced photographers
	Controls	Page 11 of 17	Olympus E-30 Comparison

Handling (7.00)

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The E-620 is a compact piece of gear, measuring 5.11 x 3.70 x 2.36 inches (130mm x 94mm x 60mm) and weighing in at 16.76 ounces (475g) for the body alone, without lens or battery. That makes it just a skinch larger in all dimensions than the company's E-420, the smallest digital SLR on the market, at 5.1 x 3.6 x 2.1 inches, 129mm x 91mm x 53mm and 13.4 oz, (380g), This is great news for those who prize portability, and folks with smallish hands. For large-handed individuals like this reviewer, it poses some challenges. When I cradle the camera in my left hand and wrap my fingers around the lens, they bump into my right hand clutching the camera grip. I found a compromise position that works reasonably well, folding my index and pinky fingers down and letting the camera rest on top of them, but it isn't the most natural shooting position.

The situation on the right-hand side is a little better. The grip has an effective texturized rubber covering on the front, and the same material on a curved thumb rest on the back. With the thumb rest balancing much of the weight, the camera is easier to shoot one-handed than most we've tried.

Our model here is a man with fairly large ands, but not the Paul Bunyanesque character the size relationship might suggest.

Controls (10.75)

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Olympus brought one idea to the E-620 design that we heartily endorse: backlit buttons for the controls found on the right panel (playback, Live View, the four-way controller, etc.).  We did find ourselves stumbling a bit when shooting in the dark and trying to locate the small Menu button on the left, though; it isn't illuminated and it's barely raised from the camera body.

Back Controls
	Menu Brings up the menu system, back out of menu levels
	Info Toggles display modes during playback and Live View shooting
	Power Switch under mode dial pivots to turn camera on and off.
	AEL/AFL Locks current auto exposure and/or autofocus setting
	Fn Programmable function button. Can control Face Detect mode, depth of field preview, one-touch white balance, bring the autofocus setting to home position, change to manual focus, change image quality modes, take a test picture without saving, use My Mode settings, or no function at all.
	Autofocus target Enables selection of autofocus target or targets using four-way controller or control dial.
	Playback mode Switches to playback mode
	Live View Starts and stops Live View mode
	White Balance Shortcut to white balance settings screen, upward navigation as part of four-way controller
	AF Shortcut to autofocus settings screen, right navigation as part of four-way controller
	ISO Shortcut to ISO settings screen, downward navigation as part of four-way controller
	Metering mode Shortcut to metering mode settings screen, left navigation as part of four-way controllers
	OK Confirms menu selections, toggles LCD between information display and Super Control Panel during shooting.
	Erase Photo deletion
	Image Stabilization Opens Image Stabilization settings menu with four choices: off, IS1 (stabilize all directions), IS2 (stabilize vertical only for horizontal panning) and IS2 (stabilize horizontal only for vertical panning).

If you're not using it for another purpose (taking manual exposure readings, for example), the Fn button can be assigned to instantly change to a predetermined settings configuration while shooting. Two groups of settings can be saved as My Mode 1 and My Mode 2.  To use them, you hold down the Fn button while pressing the shutter button. We would have preferred to toggle entirely to the My Mode setups rather than this awkward double-button-press system, but even then it's a useful feature.

Another settings-storage strategy involves the Reset process, which addresses our concern above. In addition to the ability to reset the camera to its default settings, there is a Custom Reset option that sets the camera to one of two prepared settings combinations you've stored. This is a powerful feature for finicky photographers who want to maintain a group of settings for different shooting occasions. Unfortunately, Olympus has pretty much buried these options away deep in the menu system instead of presenting them as Custom User Modes or somesuch terminology and making them directly accessible via the mode dial.

The drive mode button is also programmable. In addition to the default, it can be set to access AF area selection, AF mode, WB, metering or ISO setting. It's a bit unclear, of course, why you'd want to set this button to a function that already has a dedicated button on the back of the camera, but perhaps this is meant to appeal to left-handed index finger virtuosos.

Top Controls
	Flash Pops up built-in flash, opens flash controls menu when the flash is raised.
	Drive mode Opens drive mode menu with selections for shooting mode (single-shot, high-speed and low-speed burst), self-timer and remote control.
	Mode dial Includes auto exposure and manual exposure settings, five scene modes, and art filter/scene modes setting.
	Control dial Turns 360 degrees, uses for quickly altering settings and navigating menus.
	Exposure compensation Hold down and turn control dial to adjust exposure compensation setting.

Menu (7.00)

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The best part of the Olympus E-620 menu system is clearly the Super Control Panel -- even the name is enjoyable. By pressing the OK button, the LCD information display becomes interactive. Move the cursor to the setting you'd like to change using the four-way controller, then turn the control dial to browse through the available settings. If you prefer, pressing OK again will bring up a full-screen menu for the setting you've chosen. The Super Control Panel is very comprehensive, easy to read and navigate, and a very effective way to avoid working your way down through the formal menu system, or even figuring out which button to press for the setting you're after.

The Olympus menu system is a drab-looking construction, but the black-on-gray type is easy to read and navigation is straightforward using the four-way controller and, if you want to speed through a list of entries, the control dial. Oddly, moving down through a menu screen using the four-way controller wraps you back to the top of the current screen when you reach the bottom, while turning the control dial takes you continuously and consecutively through the different menu sections.

Menus
	Overview The menu system consists of five tabbed sections, though strangely the custom menu (the one indicated by the gear icon), is not visible when you take the camera out of the box -- it has to be enabled by changing a setting in the Setup menu (the one with the wrench icon). This is apparently a ploy to make the menus look less intimidating, but we feel it only adds confusion.
	Record Menu 1 Record mode settings are broken into two menus. The first provides card formatting and mass image erasure, choice of aspect ratio, and the same picture mode, gradation and image size settings available from the Super Control Panel. Custom Reset is interesting: it offers the option to reset the camera to factory defaults or two one of two settings combinations you've stored.
	Record Menu 2 The second record mode menu offers remote control and wireless flash on/off settings, bracketing settings for autoexposure, white balance, flash and ISO, control of the multiple exposure function and flash exposure compensation.
	Playback Menu The playback menu includes a rudimentary slideshow utility, the option to enable or disable automatic image rotation, editing functions for JPEG and RAW images, the option to select single photos or all those on the card for DPOF creation, copy images between two memory cards if both are inserted, and the option to cancel the protected status of stored images.
	Custom Menu There are 67 settings in all contained in the nine-part Custom menu. Section A includes focus settings; Section B button and dial customization; Section C shutter release options; Section D display, timer, USB mode and face detection options; Section E settings for metering and ISO, bulb timer and the antishock shutter release; Section F flash settings; Section G noise reduction, white balance, color space, shading comp (vignetting control), Medium and Small image pixel count; Section H record and erase functions; Section I utility functions including cleaning mode, battery warning level, exposure shift and battery warning level.
	Setup Menu Includes the basic setup functions of time and date setting, language, LCD brightness, and the option to hide or display the Custom menu.

Manual & Learning (4.50)

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The instruction manual supplied with the E-620 isn't bad, but it leaves out some important information.

The single 156-page book incorporates both a quick-start Basic Guide (up to page 24) and a more detailed manual, with the Table of Contents for the whole shebang inexplicably appearing after the end of the quick start part. If there were an Intimidation Olympics, the opening Basic Guide would certainly be a medal contender, leading off with illustrations festooned with enough callouts for a nuclear power plant diagram and tables that list settings without actually explaining what they do (particularly the Art Filters and Scene Modes). The initial shooting instructions fail to mention that the camera should be in Auto mode, the diagram here is confusing, the initial Live View discussion tells how to get into Live View mode but not how to get back out, and so on. This is a camera with eighteen scene modes and six Art Filters, but there is no actual explanation of what any of them do inside the entire 156-page manual -- you're left to dope it out by reading the on-screen displays, and not even told how to access those (you need to navigate to a particular scene mode and wait until the text magically appears).

Newbies may not feel the love, but if you're an experienced shooter you'll get along OK here, though the skimpy index finally had us resorting to a downloaded PDF of the document so we could use the search function. The writing is dry but comprehensible, there are enough diagrams and tables in most cases (though it all gets a bit dense in the camera customization section), and the reference material in the back of the book is comprehensive and well presented. As for learning about the included Olympus Master software, there is a cursory five-page drive-by and then you're stuck learning using the program's hard-to-navigate disc-based help system.

Incidentally, it doesn't appear that it's received a lot of loving attention from Olympus lately (there's a contest here with an August 20, 2008 drawing date), but there are some useful free photographic lessons available online at olympusdigitalschool.com. Neither the E-620 nor the E-30 are listed under the Digital SLR Cameras tab yet, but the Photo Lessons section has several useful tutorials explaining controls and techniques to improve your results in particular shooting situations, including shooting sunsets, macros, portraits and product shots.

Olympus E-620 Manual

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