Olympus E-620

Buttons & Dials

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.

Art Filters

In addition to the wide selection of scene modes, the E-620 incorporates the same selection of six Art Filters introduced with the E-30. These six virtual filters have a major impact on the appearance of your photos and, unlike the filter effects provided with the Pentax K2000, they are only available while shooting and not as playback mode alterations. We were very uncomfortable with the idea of taking photos with Art Filters turned on and having only that distinctively distorted image, without an unenhanced original to fall back on. Turns out there’s a workaround: shooting JPEG + RAW. With this approach, the JPEG incorporates the Art Filter effect but the RAW is saved as a straightforward photo, so you don’t lose any editing flexibility.

And speaking of flexibility, another oddity about the Art Filters is that there’s no way to adjust the effects: they are all-or-nothing choices. That certainly simplifies matters for neophytes who want to look like Photoshop wiz kids, but a little more flexibility in applying the filters would have been welcome.

The other point to consider when shooting with Art Filters is that the digital effects slow down your shooting substantially. We counted roughly a ten second delay between pressing the shutter and seeing the finished shot on the LCD when using the Pin Hole filter, for example.

Taking all these rough edges into account, though, we still like having the Art Filter feature overall. The soft focus, pale & light and light tone effects don’t really grab us, but the pop art, grainy film and pin hole filters can create some striking images given the right subject.

Picture Modes

The Olympus E-620 offers the same six Picture Modes as its big brother, the E30. These modes affect color reproduction along with other image quality factors outlined below. The following chart shows enlargements from our still life shot in each Picture Mode.

Each of the color Picture Modes can be adjusted for contrast and sharpness, and all but monotone can also have a saturation adjustment, with each parameter offering five settings. The monotone mode offers two additional adjustments. One mimics the effect of using a color filter when shooting in black and white. Yellow enhances white clouds in blue skies, orange emphasizes blues and sunsets, red brings out blue skies and red foliage, and green emphasizes reds and green foliage. The other black and white adjustment is a toning effect, with sepia, blue, purple and green available.

The other component part of an Olympus Picture Mode is a setting for dynamic range adjustment, which the company calls gradation. The company suggests Normal for most shooting, but also offers High Key for high-contrast subjects, Low Key for low-contrast subjects, and Auto, which divides the photo into several regions and tweaks the individual sections. When set to anything other than Normal, the Gradation setting overrides any contrast changes made in the Picture Mode adjustments.

In-camera multiple exposure is available both while shooting and in playback mode. While shooting, two consecutive shots can be combined to create a single image. It’s possible to use a RAW file stored on your memory card as one of the two images to be combined, allowing you to keep a library of component parts available or your multiple exposure experiments. By default, each image is set to half brightness, but this can be overridden so each image is reproduced with its full brightness value. For getting a precise alignment of multiple exposure frames, shooting in Live View displays a semi-transparent view of the first frame while you line up the second. If two frames isn’t enough to suit your needs, you can shoot in RAW mode and use the newly taken multiple exposure as one part of a new multiple exposure combination. Overall, though, there is more flexibility to the multiple exposure function in playback mode.

Pentax also offers panorama shooting, with stitching of up to 10 images either horizontally or vertically. Choosing the panorama option from the Scene Modes menu automatically shifts the camera into Live View mode and puts guide bars at the sides, or top and bottom, of the frame (you have to indicate which direction you’ll be panning, or you won’t be able to stitch the images later). Unlike the panorama-shooting system found on many point-and-shoots we’ve tested, you don’t get to see a portion of the previous image on screen as you move on to the next shot, making alignment difficult. Also, the stitching doesn’t take place in the camera itself: you have to use Olympus Master 2 software on your computer to see the effect, the opposite of instant gratification. Finally, the panorama feature only works with Olympus xD Picture Cards, not when shooting to CompactFlash or even another brand of xD card.

In-Camera Editing

A handful of in-camera image editing features are provided. Working with JPEG files, shadow adjustment brings out details in dark or backlit images. Redeye fix attempts to automatically repair the glowing retina problem. Photos can be cropped to two horizontal and two vertical sizes, but there’s minimal flexibility here. Images can be converted to black and white or sepia, and saturation can be adjusted in 10 steps. Files can be converted to lower-resolution versions, with 1280 × 960, 640 × 480 and 320 × 240 the three available options. Finally, photos can be trimmed to a different aspect ratio (3:2, 16:9 or 6:6), using the 4-way controller to determine the crop position.

With RAW files, up to three images can be superimposed to create a multiple exposure. After the photos are selected, they are overlaid with equal intensity and displayed on screen. At this point you can raise or lower the gain on each image, previewing the effect live after each adjustment. And if a three-image sandwich isn’t enough to sate your photographic appetite, you can save the result of your three-image combination in RAW format, then use it as one layer of an additional multiple exposure combination.

Menu

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.

Instruction Manual

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.