Olympus SP-590UZ Review

This review is exceptionally harsh. This camera is very nice to use in Auto mode taking very good quality pictures. The Super Macro pictures are about as good as those from my Leica D Lux 4. The 26 x zoom can even be used in auto mode by eg. going into P mode first and then switching to Auto. Setting the Iso to 64 or 100 and colour to vivid gets you fantastic sharp pictures all the time at any focal length. Taking pictures of ships 8 miles out at sea you need to steady your hand against something to get a lovely sharp picture at full 26 x zoom. Well done Olympus. The ED lens is super high quality consisting of 14 lenses ( 4 aspherical elements ) in 11 groups. LCD at 230000 pixels can be seen in all lights but the next time Olympus will have to do 460000 pixels on a 3 inch screen. Excellent value for money with good quality small body.

I've just spent 3 weeks using the 590 in Madagascar in a variety of settings from jungle to open savanna and feel the results have been mixed and sometimes a bit disappointing. OK I've mainly used it on autofocus, but many of my shots were for clearly visible subjects, though the problem of vegetation near an animal could ruin a shot as the camera would focus on a leaf just in front throwing the animal out of focus. With time constraints of photographing animals I found it frustrating to see good shots ruined where with my old olympus slr I'd have manually focussed on the subject and nearby vegetation would not have been a problem. I also felt that the focussing sometimes struggled with the closeups of soft surfaces such as a lemur's fur and I often heard the camera struggling to get a subject which might be quite close in focus! I found the 12m setting quite slow to save pics not a good thing when trying to focus on a moving animal! So all in all not overly impressed and wondering if I can afford a digital slr!