Olympus EVOLT E-300

Picture Quality / Size Options (8.0)
Olympus provides the EVOLT E-300 with interesting options for quality and resolution. As with most cameras, the E-300’s resolution settings are straightforward – the camera lists the pixel dimensions of each resolution. They are: 3264 x 2448, 3200 x 2400, 2560 x 1920, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 1024 x 769, and 640 x 480.

The E-300 will save completely uncompressed files in either TIFF or RAW formats. TIFF is an industry standard format that is portable across computer operating systems. Nearly universal, any equipment that can print a digital image can print a TIFF file. RAW is a generic term for the unprocessed file that a camera saves. The E-300 produces RAW files in Olympus’s ORF file format, and these files must be processed with Olympus software to be useful to other programs. A Photoshop plugin is also available to allow the industry-standard program to open ORF files.

It’s time-consuming to convert ORF files (or any RAW files) to TIFFs or JPEGs on a desktop or laptop computer. On the other hand, it slows the camera down significantly to write TIFFs while shooting.

The E-300 offers three variations of compressed files: "SQ," which represents the standard quality; "HQ," which indicates high quality; and "SHQ" which stands for super high quality. SHQ is available only for full-resolution images, and it yields a JPEG with a 1:2.7 compression ratio. HQ files are also full-resolution JPEGs, but they are made with either 1:4 or 1:8 compression, depending on how the camera has been customized. SQ images are JPEGs made at the lower resolutions. JPEG compressions of 1:2.7, 1:4 or 1:8 are available for SQ images, via the customization menu. Olympus labels the compression options numerically, with numbers that indicate what's being lost.

Picture Effects Mode (5.5)
The E-300 offers Black and White and Sepia images under its Monotone heading in the main menu. While a nice inclusion, there really is no reason to use the in-camera effects over external applications. It makes much more sense to convert RGB to black and white in an image-editing program like Photoshop, where you can use the Channel Mixer to tweak the result to your liking.

The E-300 also provides contrast and saturation settings that are effective and intuitive to use. Many users will find them much more useful than gimmicky effects. The E-300’s competitors, the Canon Rebel XT and the Nikon D70, offer similar adjustments. On all three cameras, the interface designers assumed that users would adjust them only occasionally, so they are placed in set-up menus, and not as easy to play with as, say, exposure or white balance settings.

For those photographers shooting JPEG images, rather than in the RAW format, in-camera effects make some sense. The camera performs its adjustments before compressing the image into a JPEG, and it should produce a less noisy image. In general, any sort of color or contrast adjustment performed on a JPEG will accentuate artifacts of the compression process.