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Olympus E10 SLR 2240X1680 4MP 32MB USB 4X Zoom
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Bottom Line
Professional photographers who do not need removable lenses, and hard-core amateur photographers with cash to burn and a desire to tweak camera settings, may find the Camedia E10 attractive.
Olympus Camedia E-10
E10 SLR 2240X1680 4MP 32MB USB 4X Zoom Review, by Tracey Capen, PCWorld.com March 23, 2001
WHAT'S HOT: With its all-black body and through-the-lens viewing, Olympus's E-10 has the look and feel of a professional single-lens-reflex camera. The only difference: No film (of course), and you can't remove the zoom lens. A large right-hand grip and contoured back give you a solid handle on this camera, and the wide manual zoom control on the lens barrel makes framing your shots faster, more accurate, and easier on the battery than the motorized zooms you find on most digital cameras. Its aluminum frame gives it an especially durable feel. Add to that a big, bright optical viewfinder, and you have a camera that's a pleasure to use.
This camera has a near excess of control dials and buttons for adjusting the many exposure settings. In addition to the common thumb pad for navigating through the menus, you can interchangeably use two dials (one near the trigger and the other on the camera's back) for adjusting the shutter speeds, aperture, image resolution, and other basic camera operations.
The camera's LCD monitor is large and bright, and it swings up for waist-level viewing (it's also useful for taking over-the-head shots in a crowd.) You also get a rare choice of media to use, as the E-10 supplies both SmartMedia and CompactFlash slots; you can use both at the same time or copy images from one to the other, inside the camera.
WHAT'S NOT: $1799 is a hefty price tag by nearly anyone's standards. You're paying a heavy premium for the 4-megapixel resolution and through-the-lens viewing. It's especially steep when you consider that the 4X zoom lens is fixed--though Olympus does offer wide-angle and telephoto conversion lenses. After a couple hours of shooting, toting the E-10 (which weighs in at over 2.5 pounds) might start to feel as if you were carrying a brick. The maximum shutter speed, 1/640 of a second, also seems low for a camera this costly. (Many higher-end digital cameras go up to 1/1000 of a second or higher.) Battery life is relatively short--in our battery rundown tests, the E-10 quit after 69 shots. You'll want to consider rechargeables.
WHAT ELSE: Images produced by the E-10 looked less impressive than we would have expected from a $1799 camera. They were no better, overall, than the shots that came out of the two lower-priced Olympus cameras--the Camedia C-3040 and C-2040--that we reviewed along with the E-10. Our jury scored the E-10's on-screen image quality a little below that of the other two Olympus models, and its sample-print quality a bit higher. E-10 test photos showed fine, sharp details and accurate exposures, but somewhat flat colors. Test-pattern shots showed fine, jaggy-free lines and almost no disruptive moire patterns. Close flash shots, on the other hand, ended up overexposed, due most likely to the camera's relatively powerful flash. (One of the camera's many options is a flash compensation control.) Our outdoor shots, taken on sunny days, suffered from a slight bluish cast. However, the exposure values were true, balancing bright sun and dark shade well.
For a digital camera, the E-10 makes few distracting noises and has refinements such as a flash shoe and a sync-cable socket, as well as a remote shutter control. In low-light conditions, a button lights the LED status display that's on top of the camera, and lighted diodes in the optical viewfinder make reading your exposure setting easy.
The many control switches and buttons seem haphazardly scattered over the camera's body, but most are fairly large and easy to use. The camera's mode switch has separate settings for shutter-priority, aperture-priority, and full-manual operation, allowing you to switch quickly among them. For manual focus, the dial is conveniently located on the lens barrel; it's not as precise-feeling as one on a standard 35mm camera is, and it doesn't have any distance marks, but you do get a distance scale in the LCD monitor.
Other fine points include a quick white-balance calibration button and a quick-review mode that lets you scan through all of your shots and instantly delete those you no longer want.
In playback you can dial the LCD screen from 4X magnification of a single shot down to 16 thumbnails. The software bundle is all business: Olympus's Camedia Master software is a solid basic utility for viewing your images on screen, making minor adjustments, and printing. Photoshop 5.0 LE, with its vastly more complex image-editing controls, is a nice addition.
BEST USE: Consider the E-10 for professional photography, but only if you don't need removable lenses. It will be more attractive to hard-core amateur photographers who have cash to burn and a desire to tweak camera settings often.
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Review Now! Already own it? Tell us What You Think
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Reviewed by: seva
Strengths: Aluminium body. Ergonimic design. Excellent F2 4X lense. Manual modes. Very decent battery life.
Weaknesses: Could be a little faster with CF/SM (esp. reading speed; writing is OK for me).
Overall: Serious amateur's dream. I was considering a few other cameras along with it; Sony DSC-F707 and Minolta Dimage 7 both are somewhat less expensive, have decent optics and higher resolution - but those are not the only important things about cameras. When I first took Olympus in my hands, I was amazed how ergonomic it is. Not a cheap plastic box with a few hundred worth of electronics inside (which is obsolete in a few years anyway). It is true SLR, like most of professional cameras are, rather than a low-resolution EVF. Long battery life (I use mere 1600 mAh NiMH) surprised me. It is a little slow when reading from a storage card - but then, I haven't tried the fastests ones on the market (becase current performance is good enough for me so not to force into buying one). Writing speed is acceptable; the only problem is in "rapid fire" mode. Only wish it was Olympus E20 at the same price.
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Reviewed by: azgeorgeb
Strengths: SLR, both smart media and compact flash, flash is strong
Weaknesses: close up capabilities
Overall: Great camera for the $, pictures are great, software is good. Have owned 3 other digital cameras this was the best so far. I use an extra flash FL-40 and it make all the differance in the world for a good inside picture.
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Reviewed by: danag42
Strengths: This camera handles like a 35mm SLR, the controls are accessed by buttons rather than menus. It has a raisor-sharp lens, and the 4 megapixel resolution allows for excellent 11x14 enlargments.
Weaknesses: The time to write to the card is too long, and there is no focusing grid in the finder (the original OM-1 had the same problem). This has been addresed in the E-20.
Overall: For a seasoned photographer who is used to using 35mm equipement, the E-10 offers the most painless tranlition to digital. The lack of interchangable lenses may scare off some people, but the prime lens has a very useful 35-140mm (equivalent) range and there are truly professional grade expansion lenses. I have taken excellent photos with the 200mm (equivalent) lens and the 28mm and 420mm(!) lenses. Even though the old saw is to require 300dpi in the original image file for enlargements, some professional photographers are using the E-10 (and now the E-20) to shoot weddings. In Photoshop or other image processing software, the camera will produce enlargements, that the customer percieves to be as sharp as film enlargments, at least to 11x14, and based on cropped images I would say to 13x19 and beyond. This camera writes to the card too slowly to be used for sports photography, after 3 full resolution shots it takes a while for the buffer to clear. However sports photographers use 2 megapexel cameras for newspaper quality reproduction of sports events. The camera serves well for on-site portraiture or location shots, nature, or portraits. The only caution is that the files at full resolution are HUGE (about 11and a half MB) so you will need to get at least one very large capacity storage card, I have a 512MB and 384 MB cards. This camera is suited for a small-town professional or a hobbyist who wants to capture images directly to digital.
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