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Olympus SP-500 UZ

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Performance
The focusing speed on the Olympus SP-500 UZ isn't amazing, and can be rather slow in low-light environments. Powering up the camera took about 2.5 seconds including the time needed for the lens to be extended. You can shoot thereafter every 2 seconds in JPEG. Taking RAW pictures took slightly longer in between shots, which came in at about 7 seconds.

The pop-up flash, however, is quite remarkable. It provides even lighting in most situations and gives a gentle lighting when taking portrait images. There are a lot of flash options to choose from on this camera. For example, red-eye reduction, fill, fill with red-eye reduction, and off. They also come with various intensity levels to reduce the possibility of having blown-out portraits or subjects.

The zoom speed is relatively decent, but when it zooms in, the image on the LCD will become pixilated due to the resolution of the LCD. The 10x optical zoom, which extends from 38mm to 380mm, came in useful when we were doing street photography and visited the Zoological Gardens. However, the lack of an optical image stabilization feature cut a few points off our rating.

The SP-500 UZ comes with an electronic viewfinder (EVF) that does not have a diopter adjustment. For users who are wearing glasses, that could be a problem. While the EVF presents itself as a good alternative to using the LCD for framing of pictures, we found it hard to determine if the unit was focusing correctly and had to fall back on the screen occasionally.

Image Quality
The auto white balance setting on the SP-500 UZ was generally decent and gave us a natural tone most of the time. Overall, image quality from the camera was good with colors saturated, sharpness and exposure correctly metered for.

At the camera's highest sensitivity level of ISO 400, our pictures exhibited quite a bit of noise and grain. Noise wasn't an issue at ISO 80 and ISO 100, though. However, that shouldn't be cause for concern as the grains do not pose a threat to the overall image.

 
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