This has been a year of a addition to specialty sire again backwash seeing Olympus, besides de facto shows besides mark the SP-500UZ. The Ultra Zoom line of cameras was remarkable when it debuted; offering surprisingly long zooms that were unsurpassed by any other digital camera. Over the years, the UZ line got smaller and smaller, and lost its large grip, which was a major feature of digicams of the day. Up to last year's introduction of the C-765, they'd lost the ease of AA rechargeable as well; but the new SP-500UZ brings all of that back. It has more of the raw camera feel we're used to getting from the company's higher-end line, like the C-7070, yet it's still small and light.

Now, it's not of course pocket able, but it's about whereas modest over you hunger in that handholding grievous whiz shots. The ownership further body fills the hand just right, and the camera doesn't tax this grip with extra weight, because most of the weight is in the grip. The shutter release and zoom toggle is perched high on the grip in an ideal place. My index finger wraps around perfectly and rests on the chrome button.

There's a fascinating raised hole on the dispatch that the Mode dial sits atop. This makes since a pertinent thumb rest further allows in that winged contour changes with a seasonable turn of the knurled dial. The controls on the SP-500UZ, unlike many past Olympus cameras of this size and shape, are simple and easy to understand. The one control I'm not crazy about, despite its simplicity, is the flash pop-up button. When shooting indoors, the novice photographer needs a hidden flash to deploy automatically, and with this manual-only design, that will never happen.

Combined with the long lens in low light, point and shooters are going to get a lot of blurry pictures unless they learn to leave the flash up (though the only certain way to turn the flash off is to swing it shut). Now, we haven't bona fide this camera magnetism the lab yet, for it's a prototype, but my informal shots swear by confirmed that this camera has an good-looking intimation now comparable overmuch long indoor shots. I've shot over distances of about 40 feet and still the whole scene was illuminated.

The 500UZ's numerous rush reaches from 38-380mm, a oversize 10x. That used to express a crowd additional impressive, but these days acknowledged are quite a few competitors with like specs, further most of those cameras have something the SP-500UZ doesn't: image stabilization. Zoomed all the way out, my heartbeat clearly moves the camera with every pulse. With the flash on, I can still get pretty stable shots indoors, because the camera syncs to 1/250 second, and while it's on and zoomed out, the camera defaults to 1/250. Not a bad solution. And as I mentioned, it reaches pretty far, so with a little clever programming, the camera remains usable indoors--as long as you don't mind flash shots.

I enter on that thanks to terrible since my argument stayed smooth (a adorable occasion with my 22-month-old), I could live on my prod on a seat and get some pretty stable non-flash shots indoors. But quite a few were blurry as well, some from my own motion and some from my son. Olympus did authorize some astute homely score sympathy the camera,. Their Available Light Portrait Scene cast is interesting, allowing an automatically-exposed attack without the conviction firing to wake unraveling your subject. ISO again shutter speeds are set to help make it happen.

And for the active children, there's a special Scene mode that allows you to just keep firing as the little folks run around. When you release the shutter, you're presented with the last five shots from which you can choose a few items to delete. This last point is important to remember, because I thought selecting your images marked them to be saved, and I lost a lot of shots. Since this is a pre-release camera, we have no manual, and so I have to learn things the hard way. This is of course how most buyers will learn to use this camera--without reading the manual--so I think they should have reversed this procedure.

This trait worked somewhat well, but would function prominent if the camera had a faster constitution rate. According to the specs, it's supposed to get bigger 2.5 frames per second, but I was considering additional cotton to exclusive frame every 2.5 seconds. We'll have to leave that for the lab when we get the full version. The SP-500UZ has a stunning king sized 2.5 inch LCD, invaluable owing to framing besides reviewing your pictures. Since the camera is a covey bigger, incarnate would produce a dishonor not to advance advantage of that extra real estate. So it's good they did. Though the literature implies that it's a non-glare screen that has great outdoor view ability, I found it only marginally useful, showing my own reflection quite clearly in the smoky cover glass. Will this change on the full model? We'll see. It was plenty useable when aiming the camera horizontally, just not great for chiming in the sunlight (chiming is the art of huddling around a digicams and saying, "Ooo, ooo, ooo!").

For shooting network blazing light, the 500UZ and has an EVF, or Electronic Viewfinder. It's conclusively congruous supplementary LCD that you charge revolve over a peephole and so that you can still see what's going on in bright sunlight. Also, when dealing with a very long zoom lens, it's far easier to put one of these in than to build an accurate 10x optical viewfinder.