Welcome to the second part of Camera Advice’s Olympus E620 Review. Here we take a look at the image and build quality of the E620. We also check out the menu systems in this award winning entry level digital camera.
Olympus E620 Build Quality
The E620 feels solid to hold and feels well made. All the doors for the battery and memory card are solid and responsive and all the buttons have a positive action. This gives you a feeling of confidence in the camera which I find important. Even the tilt’n’swivel LCD screen on the back felt like it could take a few knocks. In spite of this the Olympus E620 is light and small which I found a great benefit. I am so used to lugging round large professional Digital SLR cameras that I found this quite a joy to use. I could more than happily see myself using one of these as an everyday camera to carry with me to capture those unexpected moments. It is in fact one of the smallest and lightest entry level cameras on the market.
Olympus E620 Buttons and Menu
I found the menu system easy to follow. This might be because I found it similar to the Canon 5D mk2 which I often use on shoots. This may not be the case for a first time user. I do remember being pretty confused the first time I laid my eyes on the Canon menu system. Similar to the Canon it has a status display option. This means that it can use the LCD screen on the back to display all the current settings on the camera. You can also change all the settings on the this screen using the buttons on the D Pad on the back of the camera. I find this a very handy option because you don’t have to keep going into different menus and modes to change settings.
There are buttons all over this camera due to all the dedicated controls that Olympus are so keen on. I liked this feature because it meant that you didn’t have to keep going into the menu or pressing two buttons at a time to get where you wanted to go. Some may find this annoying and may be a little over cluttered. For me it also made accessing the live view option nice and easy and made me feel much more likely to use this function.
Olympus E620 Image Quality
Camera advice took the Olympus E620 up to our local climbing centre and took a couple of snaps. The results were great. The camera uses the same 12.3 megapixel sensor that goes into the more expensive Olympus E30 and I was very pleased with the results. The colors looked accurate when viewed on a monitor and it produced a nice high resolution image. The multi metering of the E620 produced slightly underexposed picture but then this tends to happen with quite a few of the automatically metered cameras. There are other metering options which give you more control over this so I wouldn’t say this was too much of a problem.
The camera also has various shooting presets such a Natural, Vivid and Muted. These create slight variations in tone and colour. I tend not to use these settings but I guess if you don’t want to bother with post production these settings will help you create the type of print you want without photoshop or lightroom software. You can also shoot RAW files and a combination of RAW and JPG if you wish. This is very similar to many pro cameras. I guess this is a lot of what this camera is about. Putting pro options on an entry level camera.
I tried the camera out on all the different ISO settings. At the faster settings as you would expect you could notice the image becoming noisier. This is something that is always an issue with cheaper and sometimes even more expensive cameras. The shot below are taken at 100 ASA, 800 ASA and 3200 ASA respectively.
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