I had been reading certain camera magazines and different reviews on various camera web sites when I stumbled across this 35mm single lens reflex camera which is a few technical upgrades compared to the Olympus E-500 DSLR.
To be honest I did not even know of it's existence until just recently so I thought I would investigate what changes had been made in comparison to the old Olympus E-500.
I waded through a dozen or so online reviews and found that they all had a very similar conclusion, oddly enough I never found a bad review so I took this to be a good sign that the camera was a decent one.
The main changes that I found where few but quite impressive in my opinion! They are as follows:-
Live View:
The first thing that caught my eye was the "Live View" feature that is now included in this DSLR camera. This means you no longer have to rely on composing your shots through the viewer as you can now use the LCD screen in the same way as you do with compact cameras, this is handy in situations where it is awkward to get to the viewer.
For example, confined spaces, or if you want to hold the camera above peoples heads in crowd situations. Using "Live View" makes it possible to still be able to compose your shot.
Image Stabiliser:
The image stabiliser in this instance is built directly into the camera body of the Olympus E-510 DSLR. Usually image stabalisation is built into camera lenses thus making each lens more expensive to produce. However, by including it into the camera body, camera shake, (which can cause blurred results) is always kept to a minimum no matter what lens you attach to it. Basically whatever lens you attach to the body becomes image stabalised.
TruePic III Engine:
This new engine improved the ability to reproduce colours more naturally by enhancing the Advanced Proper Gamma III technology to control luminance and chrominance difference signals independently, this led to better reproduction of paler colours. Colour reproduction was also fine-tuned so that they are correct and pleasing to the human eye. A result of this is that sky blues and human skin tones appear more natural.
Another improvement is that 3 frames per second image sequences are now possible even at the maximum 10 megapixel resolution setting.
The Purchase:
Having decided that I liked the reviews on this camera I thought it was time for an upgrade! I found the camera, (body only) available for £299 + £10 P&P, (which seemed to be the going rate) at Bristol Cameras who I have used in the past and found to be quite reliable. The beauty of buying another Olympus Four Thirds Mount camera is that all my existing lenses and accessories fit this body and as mentioned before they all now become image stabalised.
The only other accessory that I bought was a SanDisc Extreme III 4 Gigabyte Compact Flash that boasts a Min 20MB/second sequential read and write speed, handy for continuous shooting!
