- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 11 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"This camera is phenomenal!!"
Pros: DV-quality video, Rock-steady Image Stabilization, Battery Life, Ease and Features
Cons: Audio sampling rate (8Khz), Battery Door (no biggy), 1 gig XD card take too long to transfer
Summary: I've only owned this camera for since Friday, but given that I owned a C-750 previous to this, I knew what to expect and what to look for.. It was fairly easy to get up and running, the battery life on this camera is much better than the C-750, I'm still working off of the alkalines that came packaged with the camera. On a 1 gig card upto 700 7.1 megapixel images can be taken, or upto 10 minutes of 640x480 30fps video (DV-quality video).
The major advantage of the Olympus class of cameras, that sets them apart from most every other camera is their ability to take practically point-blank photos, in this case a in super macro mode you can take photos of images from 3cm to infinity.
One thing that is missing is in video mode there isn't the ability to re-focus the lens after pressing the trigger. The C-750 has this capability, and is something I'm missing on this camera. As with the C-750, if audio recording is turned off, the camera can zoom in on subjects while videotaping. I personally have a conspiracy theory than japanese companies intentionally cripple their products to discourage competition with product lines within the company, so supporting this theory I doubt that there is a digital camera that will do all what a DV-CAM does and vice versa. This SP-510 UZ, however comes quite close to matching the image quality, and while in movie mode one can enable image stabilization which for zoomed-in shots is indispensible. I've taken videos from far off with little or no jitter, without a tri-pod while in the video mode. Something bizarre happens to the videos taken while in this mode, you see others and yourself in ways that augment home movies tremendously. Personally, I started seeing resemblences in my face to my brother that I never saw before, all because of this Image stabilization, it's really strange.
While in display mode (which can be accessed while taking photographs, withouts touching the dial) you might notice that the photo zoom function blows photos up to sub-pixel level, such that it's hard to determine what is a suitable digital image quality. This camera can take really sharp photos if you know how to make the ISO and Aperature adjustments.. But I've found I do well to get good shots even in "Auto" mode..
There is also a time lapse mode, I haven't used, so I can't comment, but it's covered in the adobe PDF manual on the CD-ROM. The Camera comes with a very basic manual in paper form, and the one on the CD-ROM is about 99 pages.. I ended up printing mine with my HP Printer (note: HP printers, each cartridge has it's own print-head so you always get high quality images and fast prints).
MJPEG Movie mode is not great for compression of video, like MPEG4, but one problem with MPEG4 is the delta and inter-frame compression has the effect of morphing shots when the camera is moved quickly. I have this problem with a Pure Digital Point&Shoot I purchased from Target. MPEG4's are great as a target format, after using multi-pass encoding, that's the only way to really get good quality with MPEG4, it's not good as a master format. But MJPEG, on the other hand, is very close (if not practically the same) as DV encoding used in DV-cams. MJPEG is brain dead as far as video compression goes as it only JPEG compresses each frame and concatenates the frames together. But JPEG has less loss than MPEG4, especially in a single pass encoding.
The SP-510 UZ still has that terrible battery door, that failed on my C-750, but Olympus improved on how long it takes for the cannon to expand and contract upon power ups/downs,
I think this is partially why the camera has such a good battery life. You won't miss the Lithium-ions either, as I said I'm still running off the alkalines that came with the camera, I can only imagine how it would do with my Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries.
Memory cards, the high speed XD cards, even, are not fast enough when transferring data over a USB 2.0 bus.. A photo/video dump can take about 15-20 minutes on a 1 gig card.. I haven't tested this with another 1 gig card, but it's a dispurportionate amount of time to wait to transfer data, given that I could transfer photos on my 512MB XD in about 7 minutes over a USB 2.0 card reader. The camera is USB 2.0, unlike the C-750 which was USB 1.1 (about 40 times slower). But the memory cards could stand to transfer data out at the rate it takes to record data to the cards.. Like a 10 minute video takes all the space on the XD card, but it then takes 16 minutes to transfer that out to the computer.. Something is wrong, could be my computer..
Pixel quality is not terrific, but I'm not sure if this is a problem with the CCD array or the camera settings. I've noticed that it needs a bit more light than my C-750, but I can see more lines and details than I could with my C-750.
It seems very well thought out, compared to the C-750.. I'm beginning to wonder if C-net's digital camera reviewer doesn't spend enough time with the products as I really how any of these complaints serriously affect the quality of the picture or over-shadow the camera's strengths.. I'm wondering if they just look forward to reviewing the high-cost products and ignore the cheap point&shoots.. If you are easily fooled by shallow reviews, don't let this one pass you by. This camera is a steal!!! for 300 dollars (which is the going price). I had a Panasonic FZ7, which sold well in the stores over Xmas, and was serriously disgusted by the quality of the photos and videos taken with it, there was nothing I could do to improve on the quality.. But this SP-510 is soooooo much better.. That FZ7's 848x480 video mode looks like a up-sample 424x240 mode.. It helps to review these products in the store.. And if you feel you are getting ripped off, take the camera back.. I never just put-up with it.. I got a mp3 player, a Sansa E250, that failed to sync on me, and returned it to get a Samsung T9 that has since just totally blown my mind. The quality of the technology review is a product of the quality of experience of the reviewer.. A dis-interested and distracted reviewer will overlook features and go with the status-quo.. NOT ME! This
camera is fantastic!!
