Olympus SP-570 UZ Digital Camera Review

Olympus SP-570 UZ

Digital Camera Review

Dec 28, 2008 - By Steve Morgenstern
2.2 If you feel your inner paparazzo yearning to come out and play, consider the Olympus SP-570UZ with its whopping 20x zoom lens – the equivalent of a 28mm-520mm zoom in 35mm photography. We had lots of fun shooting with this camera, which combines plenty of telephoto power with a healthy wide-angle range. Image quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad either, and manual controls and customization options abound. For a detailed rundown on the pros and cons of this 10-megapixel, $450 ultra-zoom, check out the full review.  
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Picture Quality / Size Options (7.00)
Seven image size options are available:
- 10MP (3648x2736)
- 5MP (2560x1920)
- 3MP (2048x1536)
- 1M (1280x960)
- VGA (640x480)
- 16:9 (1920x1080)

There are two JPEG compression settings, Fine and Normal. The camera also offers uncompressed RAW file storage, either alone or with a simultaneous JPEG image capture. There is a price to pay for shooting RAW, though, beyond the large file sizes (over 14 megabytes for a full-res image). There's a long delay after shooting a RAW file as it's stored to the memory card before you can shoot again. We clocked it at about six seconds, which feels like an eternity if you're shooting in an active situation.

Picture Effects Mode (4.75)
There are two Picture Mode settings while shooting, Natural and Vivid. In addition, sharpness, contrast and saturation can all be adjusted on a 10-step scale through the camera menu. These settings would be a whole heck of a lot more useful if you could see an interactive preview of the effect of changes, but it was not to be. Instead, you have to tweak, shoot, review, tweak again if you like and so on and so on and so on and so on. On the bright side, if you do find combinations that suit your style, this is a perfect opportunity to put the My Mode feature to use, storing four sets of camera settings and accessing them via the mode dial.

Playback mode provides a variety of image editing and photo manipulation options, some straightforward useful, some seemingly aimed at elementary school arts and crafts projects. These include:

- Resize: only 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 options are available, which seems pretty low-res even for emailing purposes
- Cropping: Only seven size options (four horizontal, three vertical), but still moderately useful
- Color Edit: Four choices are offered, including black and white, sepia and two saturation adjustments

 


You can choose from four color effects, but can't
actually edit the colors in your photo.

 

- Frame: Holds the distinction of offering some of the ugliest retro-70s designed frame overlays on the planet

 


Frame choices seem beamed in from another era.

 

- Labels: An assortment of ten canned text overlays, including Missing You, Congratulations and Thank You, which can be rotated, resized repositioned and colored in a multitude of shades.
- Calendar: Creates a ready-to-print  calendar page with your chosen image, in your choice of eight layouts. Kinda hokey, but we like it.


Do-it-yourself calendar pages are easy to create.
 

- Layout: Sets up a page design with several images on a page, or an image with room for a caption. Six layout choices, potentially useful.
- Expression Edit: Creates four altered versions of a portrait, adjusting the mouth into shapes that change the facial expression in weird and unnatural ways. Can you say "creepy"?
- Face Focus: The camera chooses what it believes is the most important face in a group shot and blurs out the rest of the photo. A truly awful effect.

Image rotation is also available, but from the playback menu rather than the edit menu, for no apparent reason.

In-camera raw file editing is also provided. Adjustments can be made to image quality, white balance setting, manual white balance adjustment, picture mode (natural or vivid), sharpness, contrast and saturation.

The automated Perfect Fix utility has two components, redeye fix and lighting fix: you can choose to use one or both. The lighting fix attempts to brighten dark areas of images, whether caused by backlighting or lack of illumination. There is no user control over the way the utility works, and we found the results unattractive. On the plus side, the attempted fix is saved as a separate file, so your original is left unchanged.

Control Options Page 10 of 15 Connectivity / Extras
Olympus SP-570UZ Digital Camera Review Navigation
 

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