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We clicked with:
Compact and light-weight
Automatic sensor cleaning
Shots in the dark:
Some may find it awkward to handle
Too many controls in menus not buttons
Auto whitebalance gives poor results
Price Comparison:
Olympus E-400 DSLR
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Olympus are one of the older camera manufacturers and have moved from film through to digital with some success. The E-400 is their compact, go-anywhere DSLR, aimed at travel photographers looking for a DSLR but not wanting to carry one.
But would you want to go-anywhere with one? I picked one up to find out.
Specifications
The E-400 comes pretty much everything you could expect from a modern DSLR. It features a 10MP sensor in Olympus' unusual 4:3 aspect ratio (same as non-widescreen PC screens and TVs). The sensor has a 2x crop compared to 35mm, so the 14-42mm kit lens is equivalent to 28-84mm in 35mm terms. The camera offers ISO 100 to 1600.
The sensor is protected by Olympus' ultrasonic dust reduction system that activates at start-up, while the back of the case has a 2.5in LCD panel. Despite this the E-400 is remarkably compact.
First Impressions
The E-400 has one very pronounced feature - it's small. Compared to most DSLRs, the slim design is remarkable and suggests a 35mm camera rather than digital. It's also extremely light - the body on its own weighs almost nothing, even with the battery and a memory card (either Compact Flash or xD). Despite this the body feels sturdy, albeit cut down for weight. Olympus emphasises the camera's portability for travel photographers and it certainly achieves this.
The size is an issue when the lens is attached though. The small sensor crop allows the kit lens to be smaller than that of most other DSLRs, but even so the lens makes the camera very front-heavy. This wouldn't be so bad, but the small body leaves very little to hold on to - there are rubberised pads around the handgrip but almost no sculpting which makes the camera unwieldy.
Thankfully the kit lens is well constructed and can be used as the main support for the camera; some extra shape to the handgrip could improve the E-400 massively. If you have big hands then you may struggle with the E400.
The camera controls are reasonably good. The program selector and adjustment dial have a good solid feeling. The buttons are less good, feeling a little cheap, but they do have definite activation points. The control layout is good and can be accessed quickly. The only troubling aspect is the exposure compensation control, which is almost impossible to use while providing any support to the camera with the same hand. Again, a firm hold of the lens is required.
The viewfinder is generally well thought through, with clear focus markings and a good set of status indicators to the right of the image view. A less desirable side effect of the smaller sensor and lens system is that the viewfinder is quite small, but it is reasonably bright for its size and the edges of the frame are easily viewed even with glasses on.
Aside from the difficulties holding it, the camera has a good feel in use. It's easy to use, which is just as well as Olympus only supply a short paper manual. There is an advanced manual supplied on CD but a proper printed copy would have been better - especially in light of the emphasis on portability.
The other manufacturers manage compact but comprehensive manuals that fit in a pocket and Olympus would have done well to follow this trend. That said, the camera has a wide range of scene modes, including some novel modes like high-key and low-key (which bias for highlights and shadows respectively), which are there to ease the way forward for novices.
In Use
When you actually start shooting, the experience is mixed. Camera start-up is around two seconds, most of which time is occupied by the dust removal system. How much this annoys you depends on how much you value dust removal and for a travel camera this would seem to be a worthwhile feature. It's a shame that Olympus didn't make an interruptible cleaning system though, such as on the Canon 400D. As it stands, it's hard to use the camera for sudden pictures.
The shutter action is positive, if loud, and the camera responds quickly. Shot to shot speed is low though, even in JPEG shooting modes. Shooting in raw makes the problem worse, with 21Mb raw images in Olympus' own format; a fast flash card would be advised. Focusing is quick and accurate though, so once it's ready to start firing it can be used quickly.
After using the camera a short while, it becomes apparent is that Olympus have reduced the size to the extent that there just aren't enough buttons on the case. This means many shooting functions require the use of the menu system on the LCD to change them. There is a quick-access menu for common settings such as white balance, ISO and focusing mode, so you don't have to go through the full menus each time, but it still feels slow.
The quick access settings also function as the status display for the camera. As there is no room on top for even a small LCD, the camera uses the back LCD panel to show all the current settings. The settings are shown whenever the camera is sitting idle - when the trigger is half-pressed for focusing, the camera turns off the display.
The display is very bright and close to the viewfinder so it's very useful that it turns off when you want to compose a shot. However, the constant on/off flashing of the display between pictures can be very annoying when taking several photos together.
The battery life is fairly average for a DSLR of this class, though it does seem to warn of low battery some way before it runs out.
Image Quality
Images taken with the E-400 are reasonable, with well-metered exposures in good light. It makes a good effort to handle harsh lighting sensibly, with reasonable exposure choices in multi-point metering mode. The raw files (Olympus ORF format) are sharper than the JPEGs.
This is different from many entry level cameras where jepgs can suffer from over sharpening and raws look a little soft by comparison.
The images tend to be under-saturated by default, though this can be adjusted if desired. However, the auto white-balance setting is very poor, producing further under-saturated colours and often getting confused even in reasonable outdoor conditions.
Large areas of green foliage tend to cause the image to be rendered with a blue tint. Keeping the camera in daylight white balance mode reduces the problem and allows the camera to render reasonably true colours - though large expanses of greens can still render off-colour.
Image noise isn't bad - much better than most compacts and bridge cameras, though not as good as some of the best DSLRs. At ISO 100 images are very clean, though noise creeps in as you increase from there. By ISO 400 there's noticeable texturing to the colours, though it stays as acceptable luminance noise even up into ISO 800. Only by ISO 1600 is there a real impact to image quality, as the noise changes to RGB and disrupts the colours.
The JPEG images have some noise reduction applied, which reduces the impact of the RGB noise but does smear the picture somewhat. If you don't looks too closely at the details then ISO 800 can look less noisy than ISO 200 and my guess is that the noise reduction kicks in at just over ISO 200.
One other note, the review model exhibited a few hot pixels on the images, which is disappointing.
Conclusion
If you have small hands and want the full control of a DSLR for the size of a bridge camera you're going to love the E400. It has a super compact design for a DSLR and provides reasonable performance for single shots. Images are mostly good if you avoid using auto white-balance.
That said, for some people the E-400's size can work against it, making the camera awkward to use. The grip could use more sculpting to make it easier to hold. Also, the camera would benefit from being quicker at coming into action - both from power-up and between shots. People considering this as a travel camera for landscapes should check carefully - its rendition of greens can also vary from awful to acceptable, depending on the picture.
Olympus have tried hard to bring simple, portable DSLR photography to everyone and have come close to achieving that. If you need a really portable DSLR, the E-400 would probably suit you. If budget is tight, you'll find it hard to get a 10MP DSLR for anything like this price from another manufacturer - if you can spend a little more then there are other options around.
