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Auto Mode
The E-400's full auto mode takes care of everything – exposure, white balance, ISO, meter pattern and so on. If the camera is set to allow it, the full auto mode turns on the flash when it's needed. The E-400 can become a point-and-shoot camera, an option we expect many users will welcome.
Movie Mode
The E-400 does not offer a movie mode. DSLRs aren't built for it. There is to be the possibility that successors to the live-preview E-330 could shoot movies, but Olympus left that feature out of the first incarnation.
Drive / Burst Mode
We couldn't test burst mode on the E-400. The sample we examined is not a final production model, and Olympus wouldn't let us run it with our own memory card. Olympus predicts 3 frames per second in the final product, for up to 5 RAW images or 10 HQ JPEGs. HQ is the middle quality designation for JPEGs. The burst length for SHQ JPEGs will be shorter than 10.
Playback Mode
The E-400 is supposed to be a step-up camera for snapshooters who have gotten ambitious. In that context, it makes sense that the Playback function is as varied and useful as the ones on nice compacts.
It offers thumbnail views of 4, 9, 16, or 25 images at a time, a calendar mode to search for images by date, and slideshows of thumbnail pages. Given the limitations on how we could handle the camera at the show, we didn't get to check all the slideshow options.
For the more technical photographer, it shows separate histograms for Red, Green, and Blue channels, plus luminance, and full shooting data. The histograms are small and hard to read.
Apparently, the E-400 allows image editing, so the user can change a color image to black-and-white or sepia, resize images to smaller formats, and treat red-eye. We could not test these functions at the Photokina booth.
Custom Image Presets
The E-400 has 18 presets. They are: Portrait, Landscape, Landscape Portrait, Night Scene, Night Portrait, Children, Sport, High Key, Low Key, Digital Image Stabilization, Macro, Nature Macro, Candlelight, Sunset, Fireworks, Documents, Beach/Snow, Underwater, and Underwater close-up. The E-400 helpfully describes each of the modes on the LCD, noting particularly that the camera is not waterproof. The underwater modes are meant to be used when the camera is in a special waterproof housing.
Again, we could not evaluate each of these modes. In general, Olympus's modes on other cameras are programmed to set shooting parameters about the way an experienced photographer would set a manual camera in the given situation. Though they can be fooled, the basic ones, such as Portrait, Landscape, and Sports, should be useful. Shooting documents, and high-key or low-key scenes, takes a bit more insight into the photographic process, and we don't expect those modes to work as well.
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