Viewfinder (5.0)
The Olympus Stylus 410 Digital has a “real image” optical viewfinder located in the upper left-hand corner. Although optical viewfinders don’t have the slight lag that electronic viewfinders sometimes have, they usually only give roughly 75-90% of the image coverage and can be problematic when composing images. The viewfinder of the Olympus Stylus 410 Digital also has an Auto focus mark that helps the user center images for focus.

Next to the viewfinder is a pair of lights, one green and one orange, that indicate a number of things. If the shutter button is halfway down and the green light turns on, the camera is indicating the image is in focus and ready to be taken. If the green light is blinking the image can be taken, but the camera was unable to focus it correctly. If the orange light is blinking it is either indicating that the flash is charging, or that the exposure you are attempting to make is incorrect. The orange light blinks fast when images are being processed or written to the card. And finally when both green and orange lights are blinking the battery on the camera is running low and should be charged.

LCD Screen (5.5)
The Stylus 410 Digital is on the lower end of the line with a 1.5-inch polysilicon LCD screen located on the left side of the camera directly below the viewfinder. I would have liked to see a bigger LCD screen, but Olympus did its users a service by giving the screen 134,000 pixels, so it could have been worse.

When in shooting mode the LCD screen displays 100 percent of the image you are composing. In addition to acting as the primary image viewing mechanism, the LCD screen also indicates the status of certain functions or camera states such as battery life, number of pictures left, drive mode, zoom status, file size, and any other functions that are activated.

Flash (6.5)
The flash on the Olympus Stylus 410 Digital has a flash range of 0.7 to 11.8 feet at a wide angle and 0.7 to 6.6 feet at telephoto. The automatic flash (the camera’s default) is activated in low light or backlit situations. In addition to auto flash the Stylus 410 offers Red-Eye Reduction, which releases pre-flashes before the image is taken to help eyes adjust to the light and decrease red eyes in the actual image. Putting the flash in fill-in mode tells the camera to fire the flash every time the shutter is released. This can be used to reduce shadows or even out backlit situations. Finally the flash can be turned all the way off so as not to flash under any circumstance.

Zoom Lens (6.5)
Olympus Stylus 410 Digital houses an aspherical glass lens with an aperture of f/3.1- f/5.2. Its zoom ranges from 5.8-17.4mm (35-105mm equivalent in 35mm photography). The overall zoom is technically 12x, but this is the combination of the 3x optical zoom and 4x digital zoom (which when activated actually reduces the camera’s resolution). Many point-and-shoot cameras on the market today have 3x optical zoom and this is sufficient for the average novice user.