Olympus SP-590UZ

Shooting Modes (19.50)

The breadth of shooting modes brings us no end of pleasure on this sort of camera. You have automatic, program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority and full manual modes. There’s also a shooting mode called My Mode, where you can save the current shooting settings to one of four banks of presets. This is incredibly handy if you have a favorite settings array for a particular shooting situation.

Auto Mode Features

Focus

For auto focus, there are four options; Face detect, iESP (full frame), spot and area (a movable focusing rectangle). There’s also an option called AF Predict, which tries to follow a moving object once you’ve focused on it.

Exposure

While the exposure compensation range isn’t too wide, the inclusion of exposure bracketing is a welcome feature, especially given the large number of options in that mode.

Metering

Spot, center-weighted and ESP (full frame) are the options here. Nothing particularly exciting, but should serve most situations.

Self Timer Modes

12 or 2 seconds, whichever takes your fancy.

Scene Modes

If you’re a fan of scene modes, you’re in luck. There are 20 scene modes, if you include the Beauty mode that’s found in a separate location on the mode dial. Unfortunately, the manual does a poor job of explaining them, and the in-camera descriptions are brief. For instance, the Bird Watching mode is for ‘photographing birds in the wild’. And then there are the Multi Fireworks and Multiple Exposure modes, which have almost exactly the same on-screen descriptions, yet presumably function differently.

Picture Effects (4.00)

There aren’t any real Picture Effects to speak of on this camera. What it can do, on the other hand, is adjust sharpness, contrast and saturation on a 10 step scale for each.

Manual Controls (9.55)

If Manual Focus is more your cup of tea, the 590UZ does have a Manual mode, but it requires using the left and right button to fine adjust. When tweaking this setting, the center of the image is enlarged to help you get a better focus. However, on this model, this enlarged area lags considerably, making it very difficult to set properly.

The white balance presets for the SP-590UZ are sunny, cloudy, incandescent and three types of fluorescent. Beyond that there’s also auto and manual, but the latter is frustratingly implemented. While you can access the white balance choices from the quick menu, you can’t take a manual white balance from here. Rather, you have to navigate to the main menu, find the white balance menu there, and then take the reading. It’s an extra step, for a feature we use frequently.

If you’re unhappy with the presets, you can adjust any white balance setting along a blue-red axis to match your preferences.

The camera has a good maximum aperture of f/2.8 at wide-angle, which drops down to f/5 at maximum zoom. However, the minimum aperture is only f/8, which means you won’t be able to create a huge depth of field. It does have an aperture priority shooting mode, which is a big plus in our book.

In shutter priority mode, the speed can be set from 1/2-1/1000, but in manual exposure mode this can be extended to 15-seconds, or Bulb, for up to eight minutes. This is great at the long end of things, but 1/1000 isn’t particularly fast for the highest speed.

Drive/Burst Mode (7.00)

While the Olympus didn’t wow us with its speed at full resolution (see below), we did appreciate the sheer breadth of ways to shoot in high speed, and if you don’t need huge images, you can shoot pretty quickly. Sequential mode shoots off full size images at one frame per second; Hi-1 knocks the res down to 5-megapixels, but gets the speed up to six frames per second; and Hi-2 takes 10 frames per second at 3-megapixels. Also available at Hi-2 speed is pre-capture mode, which caches 10 images starting when you press the shutter halfway down. Autofocus Sequential takes a series of full resolution images, at slightly different focal points, good if you’re having trouble focusing. Finally, there’s also autoexposure bracketing, which runs three or five shots at ±0.3, ±0.7 or ±1 EV.

Shot to Shot (1.0)

Some people are all about speed, and to them we’d recommend any of the other cameras apart from the Olympus. It managed one frame per second, at full resolution. If you want really fast, the Sony HX1 can shoot 10 frames per second at its maximum resolution, which blows most other cameras out of the water.