Olympus SP-500 UZ

Viewfinder (3.5)
The Olympus SP-500 UZ has an electronic viewfinder that is slightly raised from the back of the camera body. There is a plastic eye cup surrounding it that is certainly neither comfortable nor functional. The surrounding surface isn’t raised enough to keep outside lighting from producing a glare in the viewfinder.

The SP-500’s viewfinder resolution is adequate at 201,000 pixels, but it is not as good as some of its competitors. Still, most of the ultra zoom competition is priced above the SP-500’s $379 tag. The electronic viewfinder does not have a diopter adjustment, so photographers who wear glasses could have trouble with it. This Olympus adds framing assists to break the frame into thirds like a tic-tac-toe board and has a diagonal line framing assist as well. Overall, the electronic is nice to have to save battery power, but is far behind where it needs to be to really help out when checking focus.

LCD Screen (6.25)
The Olympus SP-500 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen that is indeed nicely sized but lacks adequate resolution. Its 115,000 pixels don’t do the images justice. To its credit, the screen has a wide viewing angle and doesn’t solarize easily. However, the view itself just is not great quality. The individual pixels are visible, so pictures don’t look very smooth. There is a button that changes the view from the electronic viewfinder to the LCD screen and vice versa. The LCD brightness can be changed in the Setup menu. It’s buried deep within a pile of options, but once it’s found users can select from 15 stops on a scale and have a live view as well.

Flash (7.5)
This Olympus model has a pop-up flash that must be manually opened, even in the auto mode. The flash is engaged with a round button to the right of the viewfinder and the flash mode is selected by a button above the multi-selector. The flash is built-in and there is no hot shoe for accessory flashes, although there is a slave flash option with an intensity control from 1-10.

The flash is effective from 0.98-14.76 feet when the lens is at its widest and 3.94-11.15 feet at the 63mm telephoto end of the lens, which is fairly typical, but perhaps a bit more generous than most comparable cameras. Auto, Red-eye Reduction, Fill, Fill with Red-eye Reduction, and Off are the available modes. These flash modes can be adjusted on a +/- 2 intensity scale so faces aren’t ghostly and blown out, also enabling users to control the flash for fill and contrast. When set correctly, the Olympus SP-500’s flash evenly lights subjects. The flash has a front and rear curtain sync option: Sync 1 mode is for front curtain and Sync 2 is for rear. Overall, the SP-500 offers a variety of flash options, but the lack of a hot shoe does create limitations.

Lens (7.25)
The lens on the Olympus SP-500 protrudes from the body even when the camera is powered off, telescoping out farther when the camera is ready to shoot. The Olympus ED 10x optical zoom lens extends from 6.3 to 63 mm, which is equivalent to a 38-380mm lens in 35mm format. Constructed of 11 elements in 7 groups, the lens has two aspherical elements to minimize distortion. It has a max aperture of f/2.8 at its widest and closes to f/3.7 at its 63mm telephoto end. It’s also threaded on the end to fit 55mm filters, polarizers, and conversion lenses. Olympus has a WCON-07 wide conversion lens available that minimizes magnification by 0.7x and a TCON-17 lens that increases the magnification by 1.7x. Each of the Olympus lenses retails for about $150.

The lens (and its zoom power) is certainly the SP-500’s main selling point; the SP-500 has the longest lens of any of Olympus’ SP-series digital cameras and is designed to compete with the offerings elsewhere in the ultra zoom digital camera market. Overall, the lens is certainly one of the Olympus SP-500 UZ’s strengths, but would have been better complemented by image stabilization, which is included on many ultra zoom offerings by other manufacturers.

The Olympus SP-500 UZ has 5x digital zoom that the Olympus web site calls 'seamless,' but it will degrade picture quality and compromise image clarity.