Photography News - Olympus EVOLT E-520 Review

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Olympus EVOLT E-520 Review

A fully-fledged mid-range DSLR in a compact body, at an entry-level price – this is how one could distill the essence of the Olympus E-520 into one sentence. The new camera inherits the very well designed body, efficient handling and semi-professional feature set of its predecessor, and gains important capabilities such as wireless TTL flash control, Shadow Adjustment Technology and contrast-detect auto-focus in Live View. JPEG shooters will be delighted to learn that the default tone curve applied by the in-camera processing yields much more pleasing out-of-camera results, particularly with respect to the way specular highlights are rendered. RAW shooters will like the fact that the sensor has a wide dynamic range, even if they have to look beyond Olympus’ own raw development solutions to extract the maximum out of it. Photographers who like to make big, detailed prints will be delighted to hear that the E-520, with the right Noise Filter setting applied, will retain most details right up to its highest sensitivity settings. Those interested in infrared photography will likely find it helpful that the camera’s Live View Boost option makes it possible to frame and focus even with an R72 filter attached to the lens.