Review of the Olympus E-330 Digital Camera

This review is base on the Olympus E-330. Olympus has a reputation in the digital imaging world. They also have a long history in developing film cameras, and already for quite some years now they have been active in developing the digital compact and d-SLR cameras. Olympus has always been one of these manufacturers that are trendsetters, always searching for that one innovation, for that one unique feature. In the market for digital SLR cameras Olympus invested big-time in its FourThirds system. It was announced some years ago and now already some generations have passed by, and we got one of the latest Olympus innovative products in the office. Although we only had this pre-production sample in the office for a very short period we had enough time to give you an inside look and feel of this interesting digital SLR concept. 7.5 Megapixels, compact Olympus body and interchangeable lenses are not spectacular these days, but the Olympus live LCD preview mode is one unique feature on today's interchangeable d-SLR cameras. The Olympus E-330 is the first d-SLR with a real live view mode.

LCD Preview of Olympus E-330
One feature like the real continuous live LCD preview gives the photographer and owner of an Olympus E-330 digital SLR camera all the creative flexibility he needs to get the most out of his camera. Until today there were only a few cameras that had some kind of preview mode, the Sony Cybershot R1 and the Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro (some seconds of black and white preview mode), however; a continuous real live view was not heard of so far. The Olympus E-330 offers two different live view modes. Mode A results into full time Live View framing, mode B enables Macro Live View mode with 100% field of view. The B mode gives the photographer complete manual focus control and offers the ability to enlarge a selected section of the displayed image by 10x. As an experienced SLR user I found the Live View mode immediately a welcome feature.

The best of both worlds - optical viewfinder and real Live LCD View mode - integrated in a new FourThirds system digital SLR camera. The new Olympus E-330 digital SLR camera features two memory slots. Although the xD Picture Card is already on the market for some years now, the storage capacity and the types of xD Picture cards are rather limited for the advanced and system d-SLR camera. At this moment the xD Picture Card is only available up to 1GB which is not enough to work conveniently with RAW and high resolution JPEG images in 7.5 Megapixel resolution. So, photographers can choose the type of storage media on which they want to record their digital images. Some time ago Olympus introduced a high speed version of the xD Picture Card which offers extra possibilities like higher transfer rates, a panorama function and special editing options such as 3D or art effects. CompactFlash users may have a larger variety of cards to choose from, from standard CF cards up to high speed CompactFlash cards like the SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards which are able to transfer data with a rate up to 20Mb/sec. This year we will see higher capacities and faster memory cards.

Lithium Ion battery of Olympus E-330
In the box you will find the Olympus PS-BLM1 Lithium Ion battery which needs to be charged first using the Olympus BCM-2 charger. The BLM-1 battery has a capacity of 7.2V 1500mAh. Charging takes a couple of hours; too long in my personal opinion. It will take around 5 hours and to be quite frank; a quick charger should be far more convenient. Place the battery on the charger and you'll notice a lamp turning red. The charge lamp stops when the charge is completed. Due to the pre-production status we cannot give you an estimated number of images you can shoot with a full battery. On the top of the Olympus E-330 d-SLR camera you find the mode dial for shooting modes. The mode dial is divided into two sections; the Easy and the Advanced one. The Easy shooting modes consist of five main programs like Sports, Macro and Portrait and 20 additional scene modes. The Advanced shooting modes consist of P, S, A and M mode offering creative and most flexible settings for the advanced photographers. The optical viewfinder and the LCD display give you all the relevant information about the status of the settings. Although the camera is able to expose an image perfectly you sometimes want to shoot a number of pictures at different exposure values for each frame. Even in conditions where correct exposure is difficult to obtain, you can pick the picture you prefer from a selected number of frames with a variety of different exposure settings. The pictures are taken in the following order: Picture with optimum exposure, picture adjusted in - direction, and picture adjusted in + direction.

My Conclusion
"The introduction of the Olympus E-330 digital SLR camera is very much welcomed and interesting for future development of new generations digital SLR cameras. The Live View mode is a very useful feature and the solution of Olympus is offering simply the best of both worlds. Olympus has invested a lot of their experiences into the new E-330 camera resulting in a rich featured entry-level digital SLR camera with a lot of innovative solutions. 7.5 Megapixels, multi-angle LCD display with Live View mode, and the incorporation of the Supersonic Wave Filter, eliminating the dust problem, are key features to give Olympus every tool necessary to turn the Olympus E-330 into a big success.

Olympus E-330 White balance bracketing Olympus E-330 built-in slow flash
The same goes for white balance exposure; the Olympus E-330 has various white balance options to choose from, but you might want to shoot multiple images with different white balances fully automatically. With WB bracketing three images with different white balances are automatically created from one shot. One image has the specified white balance, while the other two are the same image adjusted in different colour directions. All three images are saved on the card. The camera features a built-in flash which offers a variety of flash settings. One of them is the slow synchronization flash that is specifically designed for slow shutter speeds. Normally, when shooting with a flash, shutter speeds cannot go below a certain level to prevent camera movement. But when shooting a subject against a night scene, fast shutter speeds can make the background too dark. Slow synchronization allows you to capture both the background and the subject. Since the shutter speed is slow, be sure to stabilize the camera by using a tripod so as not to cause the picture to be blurred.