Olympus E-620

Handling (7.00)

The E-620 is a compact piece of gear, measuring 5.11 × 3.70 × 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 × 3.6 × 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.

Buttons & Dials (10.75)

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.

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.

Display(s) (6.90)

The size and resolution of the LCD are nothing special, at 2.7 inches and 230,000 dots, but the E-5620 screen has two major points in its favor. First, it uses the Olympus HyperCrystal III LCD technology, which lets some of the light hitting the surface of the screen pass through and bounce back to provide extra backlit illumination. It’s a winning approach to the problem of shooting in bright outdoor light, particularly if you’re a Live View fan. We still experienced some issues with glare on the screen when shooting in the sunshine, but the image was bright and the colors well saturated even under these challenging conditions.

And there’s a solution to the glare problem too, thanks to the second LCD highlight feature, an articulated screen. The screen attaches to the camera body on the left, with a bracket that lets the LCD swing out horizontally by 180 degrees and pivot vertically 270 degrees. This provides great positioning flexibility when shooting in Live View mode, with the camera held overhead, down low or off to the side. And while the screen can be placed flat against the back of the camera to use in the traditional position, it can also be flipped 180 degrees so the plastic back of the screen faces the cold, cruel world and the smudge-and-scratch-prone working side is facing inward, nicely protected.

LCD brightness and color temperature can each be adjusted in 15 steps. The last photo taken is displayed while making this adjustment, a much better practice than the flying-blind preview-less setting often found on digital cameras.

The articulated LCD offers freedom to shoot at unusual angles, and protection for the screen when not in use.

Secondary Display

As with most lower-cost digital SLRs, the E-620 doesn’t have the auxiliary top-mounted monochrome LCD found on higher-end cameras. The rear LCD information display basically makes up for this, though.

Viewfinder (6.00)

The optical viewfinder provides a 95% field of view with 0.96x magnification. The diopter can be adjusted in the 03.0 – +1.0m-1 range. The eyecup is reasonably comfortable (there are interchangeable alternatives available if you disagree), though we did find that we had to move the camera around vertically to see both the full image area and the information display strip at the bottom.

One point to keep in mind when shooting with the viewfinder is that it always shows the full 4:3 aspect ratio, even if you’ve chosen to shoot in 16:9, 3:2 or 6:6 modes. The choice of aspect ratio is reflected on screen if you are shooting in Live View mode. In fact, there’s a custom setting that determines whether the aspect ratio setting applies to both viewfinder and Live View modes, or if it only controls Live View shooting and gets ignored when using the viewfinder.

Image Stabilization (5.81)

The Olympus supports three different modes of in-camera image stabilization. I.S. 1 is the basic setting for shooting with stabilization turned on. I.S. 2 is used for shooting when panning horizontally: horizontal stabilization is turned off, vertical stabilization is active. I.S. 3 is for panning vertically, with horizontal stabilization active and vertical turned off. As you would imagine, we tested using the I.S. 1 mode. And the results prove the system is useful, but doesn’t offer the dramatic sharpness gain we found when shooting with the Olympus E-30.

To test the effectiveness of a camera’s image stabilization system, we mount it in a custom-designed computer-controlled rig that recreates a consistent series of horizontal and vertical movements, designed to mimic the pattern of a person’s shaking hands at low and high levels. We shoot a brightly lit chart repeatedly and measure the image resolution of each shot using Imatest. These results are then statistically sampled to reveal the underlying pattern. More on how we test image stabilization.

With a fairly low level of shake, roughly what you’d expect from a person standing still and trying to hold the camera steady with two hands, we found the image stabilization system produced a modest loss of sharpness at the highest shutter speeds, but from 1/125 second on consistently offered a modest improvement.

Revving up the level of shake to about what you’d find when trying to shoot one-handed, or while moving, the pattern remains similar. The 1/500 second shutter speed results measuring horizontal movement indicate a larger improvement than we’d expect, which held true even when we re-shot the test. On the vertical side, there are minor differences one way or the other between having the IS system on or off until you hit 1/60 second, from which point the system consistently delivers a slight improvement.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8

The two Olympus camera produced very different results, which is probably at least in part due to the different physical dimensions, balance, lens types and focal lengths involved. For the E-620, the system proved marginally useful, but shouldn’t be considered a major selling point when considering your options.

The chart below summarizes the image stabilization scores for three of our comparison cameras (test results are not available for the other two).