- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 24 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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8 out of 8 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Point & Shoot or Creative Photography? Do Both!"
Pros: Competitive Price, Good Lenses, Broad Feature Set
Cons: None to date
Summary: I'm not what you would call an early adopter of new technologies. I was perfectly content shooting a 1970-something Contax & primaries until a friend borrowed and broke it 5 years ago. I replaced it with a Nikon N-65 and was introduced to the luxuries of zoom lenses, auto-focus, auto-exposure, scene modes and such about 25 years after the rest of the world had forgotten what a fully manual camera looked like. I never much liked that Nikon. After lugging an all metal body and case full of lenses around, it seemed too light & toy-like. A two week vacation last summer stunned me with another draw back to new-fangled ways--it was too easy to use. Not having to select & change lenses, focus the chosen lens, study the light meter, mentally calculate exposure settings, advance the film, reconfirm the light and finally trip the shutter made it all too easy burn up great gobs of film. (That motor drive costs a lot more than the price of the motor). I came home with so many rolls of exposed film, the photo processing added 20% to the cost of the trip and too many of those easily taken shots really weren't worth the cost of the paper they were printed on. Reason enough to try digital.
I set out in search of a digital SLR that would give me the manual control I enjoyed with the Contax and ease of use I'd become accustomed to with the Nikon. A price ceiling of "under $1,000" quickly limited the field to Canon Rebel, Nikon D-50/D-70, Olympus E-1, Evolt300 or Evolt500. (Pentax & Minolta products were reviewed but not considered because no local dealer seemed to stock them). I settled on the Olympus because the 4/3rds format makes sense. Preserving the aspect ratio of 35mm film strikes me as more historic legacy than intelligent design. I might have thought differently if I still had a bag full of 35mm primaries but I sold them with the damaged Contax body and the kit lens that came with the Nikon wasn't worth enough to be a consideration. The Olympus also "feels solid" which is not the way I'd describe the Rebel and it offers 8 mega-pixels in comparison to the 6mp Nikon D-50/D-70. I hadn't any experience with Olympus lenses but the reviews were pretty good and I've since found them to be quite sharp.
The Evolt 500 offers an amazing set of "scene modes" (25!). This enables point & shoot ease of use but gives better results than you'd get with a single full auto setting. More importantly, I find this to be a very good training tool. It is fun to calculate exposure, white balance, sharpness and all the rest of it, take the best shot I know how to take, hedge my bets by bracking both white balance & exposure settings and then switch to the appropriate scene mode and let the camera do the thinking. Comparing the finished images, on screen without the delay or expense of a photolab is teaching me a lot about what does and doesn't work. Before buying this camera, I also debated between the Evolt-500 and Olympus E-1. With 20-20 hindsight, I am glad I chose the less expensive Evolt-500. It probably isn't as durable and I'm told the dynamic range of the sensor isn't as good but the ability to use all those pre-programmed scene modes is quite handy when all you really want to do is take a snapshot and the ability to compare studied shots to the results obtained with scene mode settings has proven to be an invaluable tool for learning the fine art of digital photography. For this purpose, the Evolt seems a better choice than the Canon/Nikon competition simply because it offers more pre-programmed scene modes.
I've also been comparing the finished results obtainable using PaintShop Pro-10 and the bundled Olympus software. Olympus Master isn't as fully featured but it produces outstanding results. I'd recommend to anyone buying this camera that they stick with the bundled software and save the price of Paintshop/Photoshop products. It will likely take anyone new to digital some time to out-grow Olympus Master and I suspect that if I ever do outgrow it, I'll end up bypassing the Corel/Adobe learning curve and buy the Olympus Studio software that ships with the E-1.
All in all, the Evolt 500 is a very fine camera. It takes good pictures all by itself if that is what you want it to do and it offers enough manual control to appease a tinkerer like me who still misses that bag of primaries and a manual film advance lever.
Where to buy
Olympus EVOLT E-500 with 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens & 40-150mm f/3.5-4.5 lens:
$999.22
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