Labs

The E-500 seems more modern than the Canon and Nikon digital SLRs with its high-resolution 21/2" LCD screen. However, this is the only screen you get. Olympus has designed an elegant control system based around the LCD screen with various ways to access commonly used settings. This makes it easy to pick up and start using the camera.

The 8-megapixel sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 3:2 used in most SLR cameras. Annoyingly,

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Olympus has made the optical viewfinder narrower rather than taller, providing a smaller view that makes manual focusing harder. It doesn't help that the focus ring is electrically linked to focus, so focusing the lens manually feels imprecise.

The camera gives its insides a blast of ultrasound on startup to dislodge any dust. This is a great idea, though we stopped short of deliberately filling it with dirt to test this feature. The downside is that the process adds around three seconds to the camera startup. It's not particularly fast at other times, capturing just 10 shots to xD card or 14 to MicroDrive in 30 seconds. Its battery life is excellent, though, giving 917 shots at 30-second intervals from a single charge.

Image quality gave little cause for concern, but the E-500 didn't excel compared to the Canon and Nikon DSLRs. Noise was barely perceptible at ISO 800 and the automatic exposure handled lighting conditions well, but images weren't quite as sharp as those from the Canon 350D or Nikon D70s.