Olympus Stylus 500 Digital Camera Review

Viewfinder (0.0)
There is no optical viewfinder on this digital camera, but a tiny viewfinder will hardly be missed on this model. Olympus instead has opted to fill the additional space with an oversized LCD screen, which is much more accurate than an optical viewfinder would be anyway. The only downside to the absence of an optical viewfinder is that the battery power will be drained faster with the screen, which will be turned on constantly.

LCD Screen (8.0)
The Stylus 500 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen that makes reviewing your pictures easy on the eyes. The HyperCrystal screen is marketed with its anti-glare technology, which seems to work quite well. The screen’s brightness can be adjusted in the setup menu if it is ever difficult to view. With 215,000 pixels, there is enough resolution to get a good view of subjects when used as a viewfinder and provides a nice assessment of the recorded image in playback mode. The screen is flush with the back of the camera, and is unfortunately prone to collecting fingerprints. The LCD screen cannot be turned off, as it also acts as the viewfinder, so the added strain on the battery should be kept in mind.

Flash (6.0)
The flash is intelligently placed away from where wandering fingers from either hand are likely to fall. This built-in flash takes five seconds to recharge between pictures, so it cannot be used in the burst mode. There are only four modes available: Auto, Red-eye Reduction, Fill, and Off. These can be selected by pressing the left portion of the four-way navigational dial. The flash on this model is not very powerful; in fact, when inspected closely, it looks pretty cheap. Within the oval shape above the lens, there is a smaller oval that is the flash – the rest of the shape is decorative and houses the LED indicator. The smaller flash has reflective material that wraps around all edges of the inside; in the model we received, it looked like the edges were peeling up a bit. When we tested the flash, it tended to blow out subjects that were close, so avoid it in macro shooting.

When subjects were far enough away to diffuse some of the white-out effect, the flash hardly reached them. And when it did, it seemed to be spotty (the white forehead aesthetic). The Olympus Stylus 500’s flash can only reach 11.8 feet when the lens is zoomed out and a paltry 6.6 feet when the lens is zoomed all the way in. This is an extremely short range, even for a compact model.

Zoom Lens (6.0)
The Stylus comes equipped with a fairly ordinary 3x optical zoom lens that is equivalent to a 35-105mm lens in 35mm format. When turned off, the lens retracts into the camera body and is protected from the elements by rubber seals and a snapping lens cover.

When shooting in macro mode with the Stylus 500, crisp images were easily attained; however, when attempting to utilize the lens’ maximum telephoto length, the Stylus 500 seemed stressed beyond comfort, as the resulting images were often blurry.

I also found the lack of a lockable 4x digital zoom function to be annoying - if you are so forced to or want to use the digital zoom, it has to be selected each time the camera is turned on and off.

Patience when using any zoom on point-and-shoots, especially the Stylus 500, is a virtue. Slow, incremental magnifications were also tricky at times. When zooming in, it takes about 15 subtle, slight clicks to span the range of the Stylus 500's zoom.