Olympus EVOLT E330 Digital Camera Review

Review:

The Olympus EVOLT E-330 is actually the first digital SLR to feature a real "Live View" image on the LCD screen aside the optical viewfinder. This innovation is due to the preview CCD sensor located in the optical viewfinder of the camera. The LCD is also articulated, facilitating some more unusual shooting positions. The Live View system also features a B-mode that locks the mirror up thus allowing the LCD to display a preview generated by the main Live MOS image sensor.

The image quality is simply excellent as the new 7.5MP sensor has a great dynamic range and captures accurate colors, high edge-to-edge details and much lower noise levels. The TruePic TURBO Image Processor makes all camera functions and operations to take place much faster.

The unique Dust Reduction System uses the Supersonic Wave Filter that shakes off the dust from the sensor every time the camera is switched on.
The E-330 features a great 2.5 inch HyperCrystal LCD screen that offer a much better contrast that conventional LCDs as well as movement flexibility and a 160 degree viewing angle.

The camera comes with a compact 14-45mm f3.5-5.6 Zuiko Digital zoom lens that is equivalent to a 28-90mm zoom lens in film photography. The lens matches perfectly the image sensor and the results are astonishing. Equivalent to a 3.2x zoom lens, the 14-45mm Zuiko covers most photographic needs and can easily be replaced by other lenses when the conditions need different focal lengths. 

For the beginners, the camera features 31 predefined exposure modes that will cover any shooting situation from night scenes and fireworks to even underwater photography. For the more advanced, Aperture and Shutter Priority as well as the fully manual mode allow for maximum creativity.

The camera features the Auto-Connect USB technology that allows users to easily connect it to a computer without the need of any additional software. More than that, it is also PictBridge compatible and a perfect match for the Olympus P-11 Digital Photo Printer that can print a high-quality photo in less than a minute.

The camera has a metal body covered with high-impact polycarbonate plastic and features an all-metal lens mount compatible with the Four Thirds System Lenses. The focal length multiplier for this camera is 2x and therefore a 14-45mm lens is the equivalent of an 28-90mm in 35mm photography.

Olympus Zuiko Digital Lenses are ‘Smart’ lenses as they store data in the header portion of the photo files, data that will be used by the software of the camera to correct anomalies such as pincushioning and barrel distortion found in almost every other zoom lens. These lenses are also about 3 times the resolution of film based lenses.

The E-330's Live View capability requires a special type of image sensor and therefore Olympus has created the NMOS sensor that has the advantage of a bigger photo-sensing surface. This sensor is called the Live MOS Sensor and its performance is close to that of FFT-CCD sensors..

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