Olympus may be leading in the lens-length wars with its 26x SP-590 UZ, but it takes a lot more than a long lens to make a decent megazoom; the same things it takes to make a good digital camera, like speedy performance, a competitive, useful feature set, and good photo quality. Unfortunately, the SP-590 doesn't really manage to distinguish itself from competitors in any meaningful way.
Design
The design is typical: a big, solid body with a plastic-y chassis and a large, rubberised grip accommodating the four AA batteries that power the camera. In a nice touch, the bottom of the camera extends out beneath the lens to provide a more stable platform when mounted on a tripod. Unfortunately, the camera takes two equally inconvenient forms of media: Olympus/Fujifilm's proprietary xD-Picture cards, or microSD cards which fit into an xD card adapter.
Features
Overall, the SP-590 is fairly straightforward to learn and operate if you've used a digital camera in the past couple of years. In addition to all the usual suspects on the mode dial, the SP-590 includes Beauty mode, which blurs skin slightly. Even if it worked extremely well, it's way too slow — approximately 20 seconds between shots — and the result is a 2-megapixel image. However, it also includes a MyMode which holds up to four groups of custom settings, which includes the focal length setting at the time you saved them. An OK/Func button pulls up frequently needed shooting settings, including drive mode, white balance, ISO sensitivity, metering, image size and compression. As well as the standard continuous-shooting, there are higher-speed drive modes, 6fps and 10fps, but they operate at reduced image sizes of 5 and 3 megapixels, respectively. This includes a pre-capture high-speed mode that shoots 10 3-megapixel frames at 10fps from focus lock until you snap the photo.
There are dedicated buttons for exposure compensation, flash, macro mode, and self timer, as well as toggling Shadow Adjustment and a custom button to which you can assign a variety of capabilities, including image stabiliser, focus/AE lock, and focus mode. You can exposure bracket up to five shots — most cameras limit you to three — in +/- 1/3, 2/3 or full stop intervals. While the SP-590 supports optical zoom while recording video — at best the camera does 30fps VGA saved as Motion-JPEG compressed AVI files — you can't zoom and record sound. That's certainly one way to defeat lens noise. (For a full accounting of the SP-590 UZ's features and controls, you can download a PDF of the manual.)
Performance
With the exception of overly long shot lag in dim light, the SP-590 delivers pretty typical performance for a megazoom. It powers on and shoots in 1.6 seconds, which is actually pretty fast for its cohort. In good light it matches the focus-and-shoot speed of the best of its class — 0.6 second — but in dim light it struggles, resulting in an overly slow 1.4-second delay. Its 2-second shot-to-shot time matches the rest of the crowd, and enabling flash bumps that to a pretty typical 2.5 seconds. While its continuous shooting rate of 1.2 frames per second sits close to the bottom of its class, frame rate is almost immaterial with an EVF camera since your real constraint for burst usability is the blackout interval of the viewfinder, which is almost universally bad.
As is typical with EVFs, the colours look completely different than on the LCD, but it refreshes quickly, even in low light, and it's relatively well-magnified. The LCD itself is too reflective to work well in direct sunlight, but you can set everything to display only on the EVF. Olympus' optical image stabiliser works well out to the end of the zoom range.
Image quality
We debated on the rating of the SP-590 UZ's photo quality. It's not bad, and if you're not picky, you'll probably be very happy with the photos. However, even at low sensitivities (ISO 64 and ISO 100) our photos displayed visible noise, a lack of sharpness and had that painterly artefact quality usually associated with higher ISO images, which makes prints look soft. The automatic white balance yields cool results in all lights (which, ironically, results in pretty good rendering under incandescent lighting). But metering and exposures are good, and there's practically no fringing. Colours are vibrant and pleasing, but not very accurate. The low-resolution video capture looks pretty good and perfectly sufficient for YouTube, but it's hard to get around the audio/zoom trade-off.
These samples actually make the SP-590's low-ISO sensitivity shoots look better than they are, because the ISO 64 and ISO 100 crops are sharp and relatively free of artefacts. Even so, you can see how image quality starts to degrade at ISO 200, with both an increase in colour noise and a loss of detail. (Credit: Matthew Fitzgerald/CNET)
Ultimately, the Olympus SP-590 UZ ranks as a functional but not particularly notable superzoom. While none of the current models have a 26x zoom lens, as with many superzooms the EVF makes it impractical to shoot the things most people want the long lens for — kids' sports, for example. So you might as well go with an alternative: save money with a cheaper camera or go for a more expensive camera and get better image quality and performance.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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| Time to first shot | Typical shot-to-shot time | Shutter lag (dim) | Shutter lag (typical) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
2%
1%
