Olympus SP-510

Manual Control Options
The fully manual mode is accessed by setting M on the mode dial, and the left and right directional buttons then set aperture, with the up and down buttons setting shutter speed. This is a reasonable solution; it’s a lot easier than most small cameras (where you have to use one set of buttons to set shuttle speed and then hold down another button and use the first two to set aperture). But it’s not as easy as having two proper control wheels; you have to look away from the screen or viewfinder to figure out which buttons to press, so it does take a bit of time to set up a shot.

Focus
There are three auto focus modes: iESP (where the camera analyzes the scene and chooses the subject), spot (which uses a spot at the center of the screen) and area (which uses a user selected spot on the screen as the active focus point). The autofocus can also be set to constantly keep the camera in focus, even when the shutter isn’t being pressed halfway down. This can be useful for shooting movies where the subject moves around. The auto focus seems to be generally pretty responsive, zeroing in on the appropriate focus point quickly.

Manual focus is also supported, with a central area of the screen being enlarged to check focus. Setting the focus is relatively simple, but it does take a few seconds to go through the entire focus range.

Exposure
Exposure compensation of two stops up and down is offered from the Camera menu. It’s pretty easy to deliberately over or underexpose a subject in difficult conditions.

Metering
Three different metering modes are supported: iESP (which is a sort of average mode), spot metering (where a single spot at the center is used for measuring) and a center-weighted mode.

ISO
The SP-510 UZ has a huge range of ISO settings, starting at 50 and going up to an impressive ISO 4000. Settings above 1600 do have a price, though: the maximum resolution falls to 3 megapixels. Olympus refers to this feature as BrightCapture, TK.

White Balance
Six different white balance settings are offered, plus a manual white balance mode. Most cameras use a white card to set the white balance automatically, but the SP-510 UZ shows a live preview of the image and allows you to manually set the white balance on a 14-point scale. This is a different approach, and it works quite well.

Shutter Speed
The shutter speed range of ½ second to 1/1000 is a little bit small: some other similar cameras offer 1/4000 or higher. You can extend the exposure to 4 seconds by using the night scene mode, or up to 15 seconds by using bulb, though.

Aperture
The large lens may take a lot of room, but it has advantages in gathering plenty of light: the aperture range of f2.8 to f8.0 is better than some cameras we’ve seen. It would be nice to see some smaller apertures, although there are limitations when dealing with smaller sensors.