Camera Excellent! Everything else is weak.
Written: Feb 27 '02
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Pros: Fast picturetaking, good picture quality, good feature set for price
Cons: Horrible manual, mediocre software
The Bottom Line: Does what it was built for very well- take great looking pictures, with a nice set of "extras" included. Outside the poor manual, a great deal.
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| shrugger's Full Review: Olympus Camedia D-510 Zoom Digital Camera |
Bottom line: The D-510 is the best lower mid-range digital camera I found.
I recently decided to upgrade from my ancient (but then top-of-the-line!) 680x420 Minolta. After "road testing" a couple cameras friends and family owned- I knew none of them were for me but knew what I was looking for:
1- Little or no "lag."
The great thing about low-res cameras is that if you get a good one, as soon as you click- the camera takes the picture. Unfortunately, the higher the quality, the longer most cameras take before actually snapping the picture. Most cameras I tried out took 1/2 to 3/4 of a second before snapping the picture. That may not seem like much, but it often means the difference between the perfect picture and one you just want to delete. I have 2 small children that are the subjects of 95%+ of my picture taking. I need a camera that moves as fast as they do!
2- Something in the low 2 megapixel range.
Normally, I'm a gadget geek and want the best of everything- but I found the 3 and 4 megapixel cameras to be less effective all around- obviously they cost more, but it also means fewer pictures on your memory card if you actually use the higher capacity, more work to "dumb down" the pictures if you want to share them by e-mail (friends with dial-up connections tend to get a little ticked off when you send them 10MB worth of pictures!), and little practical benefit (unless you really want to print out 8x10 photo-quality prints- the extra resoultion seems to be a waste). I've been told a camera with 4 megapixel resolution will take a better 2 megapixel picture than a 2 megapixel camera, but I've tried and my eyes don't see the difference...
3- Crisp, bright, high quality pictures!
It's amazing the range in quality you can find between cameras with similar resolution ratings. No matter what kind of digital camera you're looking for, don't forget this: TRY IT OUT BEFORE YOU BUY! You're about to plunk down several hundred dollars- go to a service-oriented camera or electronics shop and have them take some pictures and upload them to a computer for you to see. If you have them take the same picture with 3 different cameras, you'll be surprised how different those pictures may look.
OK, enough rambling about me and what I wanted- why would YOU want the D-510.....
1- This camera is pretty fast. There is a noticeable lag between click and shoot, but it's as least as fast as the best I tried and far better than most.
2- The pictures are great- very crisp, clear, and vibrant. The camera fares extremely well in a variety of lighting conditions. It's not as good in extremely low-light as a select few higher-end cameras, but quite decent. It's quite excellent in extremely bright conditions and actually takes better pictures in direct sunlight than my 35mm camera!
3- Excellent set of features for the price range. You get a full range of resolution options (not just high, medium, and low- see below), a decent level of image control, USB connection to your PC, a QuickTime movie mode (that's actually pretty cool if you want to send a video e-mail to Grandma!), both optical and digital zoom (3x each, total 9x), panoramic mode, ability to store uncompressed (TIFF) images, and more.
OK, so what are the problems.......
1- The manual is completely and utterly horrible! A number of features are completely undocumented in the manual. Just try and figure out how to use panoramic mode from the manual- it never even appears! Other features are very poorly described. Basically, this is a camera you'll need to experiment with. If you're not comfortable experimenting, I'd suggest another camera. Once you've played around with it, you'll find most everything to be straightforward, though.
Note: The one non-intuitive feature of the camera is fine-tuning the resolution. You can set it for Super High Quality, High Quality, or Standard Quality easily enough- and this is probably fine for most purposes. However, the camera really allows for 6 different settings (max resolution, medium resolution, low resolution and then high or low compression for each of these resolutions). To get to this feature you actually have to select Standard Quality, and then you are presented with the full range of 6 settings. Not intuitive- but the rest of the camera generally is.
2- Software. The image downloading/processing software isn't great. It has some nice features like drag-and-drop downloading and batch picture renaming. Otherwise, there's nothing special or advanced here. The software is on-par with other moderately priced cameras. But if you want to do any power-tweaking of your pictures, I'd recommend a 3rd party software application.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 299
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Epinions.com ID:
shrugger
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Location: Virginia, USA
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
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