Olympus EVOLT E-500By: Shawn Barnett and Dave Etchells8.0 megapixels, ZUIKO DIGITAL lens mount, digital SLR design, and loads of features! <<Design :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 5:ViewfinderReview First Posted: 09/25/2005, Updated: 12/05/2005 |
Viewfinder
The Olympus E-500 is a true digital SLR design, meaning that the optical viewfinder presents a live view directly from the lens. The rear panel, 2.5-inch Hyper crystal TFT color LCD screen is just for menu and image review. The optical viewfinder accommodates eyeglass wearers with a diopter correction adjustment and a reasonably high eyepoint, leaving a modest amount of room between your eye and the finder for eyeglass lenses to fit in, although as I mentioned earlier, I generally found myself pressing my own eyeglasses up against the rubber eyecup.
Fixed in the center of the viewfinder display are central autofocus and exposure targets, but an information display lines the right side of the frame area. This (slightly cryptic) display reports basic camera settings, including aperture, shutter speed, focus confirmation, flash mode, white balance, AE lock, exposure compensation, metering mode, battery level, and the current exposure mode.
As mentioned earlier, the Olympus E-500 doesn't have the usual top-panel data readout for displaying camera settings separately from the LCD viewfinder. What it does have is one of the nicest LCD-based camera-status displays I've yet seen. This screen appears in capture mode when you press the Info button at the lower left corner of the camera's rear panel. (You can also program the camera to display it on startup.) It shows current exposure settings, main exposure mode, exposure bias and metering mode, focus mode, drive mode, image size/quality setting, ISO, White Balance and color mode settings. A slightly more detailed display adds color space and white balance compensation options as well.
When using the LCD monitor to review captured images, you can zoom in up to 14x on displayed images by turning the Control dial, and then scroll around the enlarged image using the arrow buttons. This is very handy for small details, or precise framing, and the 14x magnification is enough that you can actually check focus on the LCD display. Another handy feature with the E-500's playback enlargement option is that you can check which portion of the image you've enlarged by pressing the Info button during enlarged playback. The full image is then displayed, with a green box highlighting the enlarged area. There's also an Index display option which shows 4, 9, 16, or 25 images at a time, by rotating the Control dial toward the Index position (left). Furthest left is a calendar display mode that displays the most recently-captured image for each date as a tiny thumbnail on a small calendar.
Pressing the Info button during normal image playback scrolls through a range of information and image display modes. The default display is of the image with the quality, memory card, image number, and filename. One press of the Info button increases the information overlay to include the date and time of capture, and resolution. A second press of the Info button expands the information overlay and overlays an RGB histogram for checking the tonal values. Pressing the button one more time displays the standard image histogram, while another press shows the image with the quality setting, and any blown-out highlights flashing white to black to reveal areas of overexposure. Another press blinks any extreme shadow areas, as with the highlight setting. A final press shows the image without any information at all.
Like some other Olympus digicams, the E-500 also offers the ability to resize your images post-exposure, to create smaller versions more suitable for emailing. An image editing menu option lets you change the color mode to black and white or sepia, also post-capture.
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