Olympus Olympus SP-570 UZ

Reviewed by: JustPlainDon

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Telephoto & supermacro!!!! Incredible!

Weaknesses: Not difficult to operate; a little bit of a learning curve. A little on the expensive side, but nothing else in this price range has the 20x (optical) telephoto. Not recognized by 64-bit Vista OS.

Overall Evaluation: I've never used a digital camera with this many features (film camera, yes; digital, no). To be honest, I could use the camera right out of the box to take regular pics from wide angle to telephoto. Getting around the features were not difficult, First thing was to check out the telephoto and the macro. One word, AMAZING! With the macro you can shoot as close as around 1/2 inch (but it better be very bright). The telephoto truly is sharp and comparable to a 500 mm lens in 35 mm photography. I printed out a 3648 x 2736 image using a 42" HP printer at work and I was amazed. Final size was 56" x 42". The detail was not to be believed. Very crisp image and good detail. While I have not done any tests to determine how accurate color is, so far all colors have been true by just casually "eyeballing" it. Not too warm, not too blue, everything seemed about right. I did notice that if you leave the camera hooked up to your PC (you connect with the camera turned off), it will continue to use battery power. After 24 hours (not sure when it died), the batteries were drained. Buy some good Ni-MH recharagables (2 sets of 4 to be prepared). The camera was recognized by PCs with WinXP & 32-bit Vista. 64-bit Vista did not recognize the camera which somewhat surprised me. I'm very pleased with my camera so far.