Olympus SP-510

Connectivity
Software
Olympus bundles their own Master software with the SP-510 UZ, which can handle transferring images, organizing images and some basic editing tasks. It can also create panoramic images and create calendars and index cards for printing. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but it handles the basic tasks that most photographers will need adequately.

Jacks, ports, plugs
There are only two ports on the SP-510 UZ: the power port and the combined USB and AV cable port. The first one is pretty obvious (just don’t plug in the wrong power adapter by mistake), while the second is the location for the USB and AV cables. This combination port means that you can’t use a generic USB cable: they just won’t fit. If you loose the cable that comes with the camera, you’ll have to buy another from Olympus. The AV cable has stereo audio plugs and a composite video plug, so don’t expect anything too high quality from this. You control the image playback from the camera: there is no remote control.

Direct Print Options
The usual suspects line up here: support for both DPOF and PictBridge is included, so you can select images to be printed on the camera, or connect the camera directly to a printer without having to use the PC. That’s useful if the kids are busy playing games and you want to print out some cute baby pictures in order to scare them off so you can play.

Battery
Four AA batteries power the camera, and Olympus claims an impressive battery life of 630 shots. We haven’t been able to test this to verify their ambitious claim yet. NiMH rechargeable batteries can also be used.

Memory
Olympus didn’t specify how much internal memory is built into the camera, but it’s only enough for a handful of images at the maximum resolution. The highest capacity xD-Picture card currently available is 2Gb, but Olympus only claims compatibility with 1GB cards. The larger ones may work: we were unable to test them.

Other Features
Electronic Image stabilization – Olympus makes a big play of the image stabilization features of the Sp-510 UZ, and the electronic stabilization does seem to be quite effective in out (rather limited) tests. Enabling it did quite a lot to compensate for the shaky hands of your over-caffeinated, overtired correspondent, but we’ll reserve final judgment until we get to do a proper test in the labs. Electronic image stabilization is usually not as effective as the optical version (where an element of the lens shifts to react to movement), but that also likely helped to keep the camera’s price down.

Time Lapse - A rather nice time lapse feature is included, which can take up to 99 images at a user-defined interval of up to 99 minutes. The auto-power off is disabled when this feature is used, but you’d need to use the optional power adapter if you were shooting 99 images once every 99 minutes (which would take 6 days, 19 hours and 12 minutes.

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