Photo quality is decent; if you don't compare it to that of other cameras, you could probably be pretty happy with it. Hues are accurate and white balance is neutral, but a lack of dynamic range in the highlights make photos look low-contrast with desaturated colors. JPEG images are soft--the raw versions unusably so, even after turning up the sharpening as far as possible--with details falling just shy of resolved. Focus falls off sharply on the left side, producing haloes on light edges. Photos shot at ISO 64 and ISO 100 have little noise, but at ISO 200, the SP-310/320's odd combination of noise suppression and aggressive sharpening yields a noticeable, mosaic-like grain that is visible on 8x10 prints. With the best cameras in this class, you can shoot as fast as ISO 400 before running into comparable artifacts. (The higher the ISO setting, the faster a shutter speed you can use, but unpleasant artifacts increase too.)
The Olympus SP-310 and the Olympus SP-320 are competent shooters and compact, feature-rich cameras that are nevertheless outclassed by competitors' speed and photo quality.
Seconds
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
 |
Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
Frames per second
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
- See more CNET content tagged:
- Olympus Corp.,
- camera,
- shot,
- photograph,
- LCD
Olympus SP-310:
