By Lori Grunin
12/11/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/digitalcameras/0,39005881,42588288p,00.htm

Once you mention the Olympus SP-570UZ's 20x zoom lens, the rest of the camera's feature set seems almost superfluous; with an atypically wide-angle lens for any class of single-body cameras plus an exceptionally long telephoto view, the lens is the raison d'être for the camera. But this top-of-the-line model for Olympus' megazooms has more going for it than just a big lens.

Design

At 118.5 x 87.5 x 84mm and weighing 445g, the 10-megapixel SP-570UZ takes up more space than the SP-560UZ. In fact, it's almost as big as Olympus' E-420 dSLR. (Much of the design hearkens back to the days before Olympus shortened "Ultra Zoom" to "UZ.") But all that room allows it to have a great, comfortable feeling grip, hot shoe, and a thumbwheel on the top for adjusting shutter speed, aperture, and so on. The 2.7-inch LCD is also a minor step up from the SP-560UZ's 2.5-inch display. The large grip accommodates four AA batteries that power the camera.

The menu navigation is typical Olympus, which means logically arranged with large, easy-to-read text and explanatory text which you pull up with the press of a button. The help text is small and looks crammed into the left half of the screen, as if that aspect of the firmware were copied directly from another camera with a smaller display. As is becoming common on dSLRs, you can press a button that conjures a grid of the camera's current settings and change them directly via the thumbwheel which we really like. However, Olympus forgoes a zoom switch in favor of a servoelectronic manual zoom ring on the lens. Unfortunately, the ring isn't nearly as responsive as it should be, and we found it inaccurate and hard to use, making for a frustrating shooting experience.

Features

The camera has all the manual and semi-manual features you'd expect from an enthusiast model as well as a host of automatic modes targeted at less experienced shooters. Naturally, it includes sensor-shift image stabilization, without which the 20x lens would be pretty useless. Among the more notable features is the Guide mode, which offers task-centric, step-by-step instructions for various shooting scenarios. And we've always been a fan of Olympus' My Mode, which in the shooter allows you to store up to four sets of custom settings. As with the SP-560UZ, this model has a hotshoe and supports wireless flash, which can come in quite handy and was quite easy to configure. The camera can capture typical, OK-looking 30fps VGA movies, but we couldn't zoom while recording clips, which seemed a waste of that lens.

Performance

What held the SP-570UZ back was its performance--it's even slower than the SP-560UZ which was pretty sluggish. It took 3.3 seconds to power on and shoot-- understandable, given the initializing of a lens like that must take some time, but it was still a bit of a spontaneity killer. Focusing and shooting in optimal conditions took 0.8 second, but that rose to 1.8 seconds under hard-to-focus conditions. Both of those times are not only below average, but we found it quite difficult to shoot candid shots of animals and kids because of the sluggishness. The camera's 2.5-second shot-to-shot time is likewise subpar, though 2.9 seconds including flash recycling is more in line with some competitors. And with burst rates of about 1fps, on top of the slow single-shot performance, you simply don't want to use this camera for action (there's a faster, reduced resolution mode, which we don't test). Though the camera supports RAW, it took 9 seconds between shots, which makes it impractical for all but studio-type work.

Even formatting the xD-Picture Card feels slower than usual. We could compensate for focus lags by operating in Fulltime AF, but we don't really like continuous AF modes on any camera for a couple of reasons. First, it's a significant drain on the battery; the battery is CIPA rated for a reasonable 390 shots, but you don't want that to drop a lot. Second, we found the constant vibration of the lens mechanism really annoying. The camera also has a predictive AF mode, in which it can maintain a lock on a subject moving back and forth. But its efficacy was subjected to the whims of the camera's other performance issues.

Image Quality

On one hand, Olympus deserves some points for the F2.8-F4 26-520mm lens, which is clearly one of the main attractions of this camera. It's got the view you need for most any scene you'd like to shoot, from a broad wilderness to a single bird in flight above. The tradeoff for that single-lens flexibility is generally sharpness, distortion and fringing. But in that respect, the SP-570UZ, like most of its peers, unfortunately disappoint. Most photos are softer than we'd like, and there's notable barrel and pincushion distortion over the extremes of the focal range. We couldn't seem to figure out how serious the fringing problem is, though. On one hand when it's bad, thick, noticeable halos were seen around edges, and it's not just high-contrast ones. But it didn't appear very frequently, even in some instances where we expect to see it. Also, there wasn't any noticeable vignetting (darkening at the corners).

In other respects, the photo quality is solid, but not great. The camera rendered most colors pretty accurately, though even with colors settings adjusted to Natural, some tones (most notably of manmade objects like clothing) seem to get boosted a little too much. Exposures looked even and accurate, and the metering performed as expected--no surprises. Its noise profile was pretty typical for megazoom shooters as well--photos were relatively free of noise and digital artifacts up to ISO 200, which then there were visible degrading of details.

Though it stands out in the features department, the Olympus SP-570UZ's slow performance seriously undercuts many of the potential uses to which you might put those capabilities, and for some, the zoom ring implementation will put a damper on the rest of the shooting experience.