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We clicked with:
Small, light body ideal for travel
Great high ISO image quality
Vibrant jpegs
Live View is a boon
Shots in the dark:
Live View slows down picture taking process
Three AF points are a limitation
Price Comparison:
Olympus E-410 DSLR
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In the E-410, Olympus has set out to make the ultimate travel DSLR. It's smaller and lighter than any of its rivals. This is nothing new for Olympus: its long-running OM series of 35mm film SLRs managed to serve up fully-featured (for the time) camera bodies without the excess baggage.
Today, we have polycarbonate camera bodies and ABS lens mounts in place of metal and yet still the camera body weighs heavy. Not here, this little camera weighs just 375g. Even adding the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, the lithium ion battery and a card hardly bring weight up too drastically.
The Olympus E-410's body is just 130mm wide, 91mm high and 53mm deep. In other words, it's tiny. If you have huge goalie hands it might be a problem, but for those of us with dainty little Germans, everything fits snugly and the control surfaces are very well laid out and quick to learn.
Features
For all its small footprint and low weight, the camera is remarkably well featured. It's got a 10.9 megapixel sensor, of which 10 megapixels are useable, on a standard Four-Thirds sensor. It also sports the standard SSWF (supersonic wave filter) dust-shakey system that works wonders at eliminating nasty blobs on the sensor.
The Olympus E-410 also features a host of picture modes. You can have normal, vivid or muted JPEGs, or you can drop into monochrome, and that gives you a series of tones and filters to play with, such as sepia blue, green or purple tones, and red, yellow, orange or green filters.
There's a series of scene modes too usual on-dial modes plus a further 20 sub modes. ISO settings range from 100-1600 in one-stop jumps, and there's also an auto ISO setting. AF relies on the company's standard three-focus-point system
Operation
This might seem basic to those used to multi-point focusing systems, but the Olympus E-410 is fine in practise, as long as you aren't a sport shooter. The kit lens is improved over previous models. There is still some barrelling at the wide end, but the lens is otherwise comparable with most kit lenses at this level.
The 2.5” LCD screen provides all the information prior to exposure, with either a simplified or full screen of info. The downside to this is it's not easy to read in strong lighting, but it's good to put all the info in one place.
And then there's Live View. The preview system offers a live feed from the Olympus E-410's sensor, overlaid with an optional histogram, depth of field preview, grid screen, cross hairs… the works. It slows down operation, as the mirror needs to flip down occasionally to control autofocus, and this introduces an 'interesting' klack-klack sound to the proceedings. Nevertheless, it's a useful addition to the DSLR arsenal and one that's hard to live without once you are used to it.
Picture Quality
Some are troubled by packing in 10 megapixels on a Four-Thirds sensor, thinking the close proximity of photosites to one another is a recipe for high ISO noise.
Fortunately, these fears are unfounded, as the Olympus E-410 has excellent high ISO performance, essentially noise-free from 100-400ISO, and acceptable noise even at the 1,600ISO setting. Better still, there's no noticeable colour shift or desaturation as you rise through the sensitivity.
Click images for full size image examples at set ISO
The camera delivers excellent out-of-camera JPEGs, although the dynamic range isn't that, er, dynamic. You seem to tread a thinner line between blocking up shadows and blowing out highlights than usual on this camera.
The evaluative metering system appears to slightly underexpose to preserve highlights, but the overall metering system is excellent and is only foxed by strong contrasty lighting. Colours are excellent, however, as are the picture mode settings on the Olympus E-410. We are especially fond of the blue cyanotype monochrome mode.
Flash is good, too. The pre-flash red-eye killer is effective, but too stroboscopic (a couple of seconds of mini-flashes mean no red eyes but angry faces), but it's fine for both mid-to-close flash and fill flash.
Most of the limitations here are small, and so is the camera. That's the big point here; this is a camera that's small and light enough not to take up the bulk of the crazy hand luggage restrictions UK air travellers have to suffer.
We reckon that, among rock-hoppers, mountaineers and world travellers, the Olympus E-410 is the camera of choice.
