The Good And The Not So Good About The Evolt 510 Digital Slr

By Author: Jack Church
Total Articles: 158
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The new Evolt 510 is a great camera for its price. Continuing on Olympus successful Evolt 410 the Evolt 510 brings more features and fixes some bugs found in the Evolt 410. Here are some random good and bad things found in the Evolt 510.

There is no doubt that two of the good things about the Evolt 510 are its well spoken of features the image stabilizer and the live LCD view. The image stabilizer implemented in the Evolt 510 is an in-body image stabilizer that can work with any lens that is mounted on the camera. Although not the same quality as gyro-optical based in lens image stabilizer the Evolt 510 image stabilizer can help turning many of those blurry photos into sharp and crisp professionally looking digital photos.

The live LCD view on the other hand will help you take pictures in conditions where the optical view finder can not be used. There are many angles and compositions that can be very compelling and are executed with the camera far form your face and your eyes. With the live LCD view you can now hold the camera farther from your body while composition a photo by simply looking at the live video ...
... stream on the camera color LCD screen.

One of the problems with the Evolt 510 is the lack of a focus ring or focus buttons on the lens. Many times when you have to use manual focus using a focus ring is the natural thing to do. The next best thing are buttons on the lens. Both are not available with the Evolt 510.

Another Evolt 510 problem is its interface to the advanced features. If you are a professional photographer and need to often set the advanced features then the Evolt 510 is not your best choice as you would waste time going through many menus. It would have been nice if the Evolt 510 had macros or shortcuts to get to those settings.

The Evolt 510 also has problems with white balancing. In extreme conditions the camera white balance can be off and result in wrong colors. The Evolt 510 auto focus is slow and although the focus eventually is set right the slowness can be annoying and sometimes you might be losing a photo opportunity.

The Evolt 510 is bigger than its ancestor the Evolt 410 and also has an additional grip which makes holding it easier and taking pictures more stable. The extra grip is also rubber coated which further helps in keeping the camera stable. One of the weird design flaws of the Evolt 510 is that its weight is not balanced. When holding the camera it feels like it is leaning to the side where the battery and memory card are. Although it sounds like a minor problem when using the digital Evolt 510 SLR for a long day of photo shooting this can get annoying and after a whole day of work also put more stress on your hand as it needs to constantly compensate for that imbalance. Jack Church explains more on help evolve as photographer