Olympus SP-560UZ Digital Camera Review

November 23rd, 2007

Olympus SP-560UZ Digital Camera comes with great components; 18x optical zoom lens; 8.1 megapixels, optical image stabilization; TruePic Turbo III image processor with face detection technology; can photograph large group portraits, faraway football goals, and everything in between; feature-laden; $499 price tag, about $100 more than its competitors; two other models have come out with nearly identical specs, but cost much less: the Fujifilm FinePix S8000fd and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 ; pricey SP-560 didn’t fare well; doesn’t have much to offer compared to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18, the Canon S5, and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H7; suffers from inaccurate and undersaturated colors, disappointing resolution performance that shows obvious barrel distortion, very ugly blue noise that makes ISO speeds of 1600 and 3200 essentially unusable, and malfunctioning long exposures that make the right corners of the photos glow; has very low noise at ISO 50 and 100, as well as excellent dynamic range at those ISO speeds. Most telling, however, is the 560UZ didn’t even perform better than its predecessor, the Olympus SP-550UZ, in most image quality categories; high-quality components; 2.5-inch LCD screen with 230,000 pixels and very wide viewing angles, an electronic viewfinder with a smooth view, and a pop-up flash that hardly ever catches a red eye; long lens [unable] to function in Movie mode when the audio is turned on, only when the audio recording is off; recognized three faces at a time but didn’t track as well as similar technology on the Canon S5 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.

The Olympus SP-560UZ has a lot of great features, exposure modes, and components packed into a comfortable body, but its pictures don’t turn out as well as they should. The autofocus system is slow, so fleeting moments are missed. Many captured images are plagued with noise and have horrifically inaccurate colors. It’s not worth the $499 price, especially considering the less expensive competition outperforms it.

Washington Post

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Entry Filed under: Olympus, Review, Digital Camera