Overall Assessment
2007
At the advanced amateur level, these Olympus systems are lighter, smaller, somewhat cheaper, and give about the same image quality as their competitors.
In the future, I hope we’ll have faster autofocus, longer high-quality lenses, better low-light performance, and a better viewfinder display. I bet all of those are coming soon.
I also hope we’ll have one-button switching between manual- and auto-focus, and one-touch spot metering while in any mode. I’d bet against those, though.
Higher resolution is always nice, but we may be at the point of diminishing returns. I would rather see better low-light performance at 10Mpix than the same low-light performance at 13Mpix, if that trade-off were being offered.
The bottom line is that I came back with photographs that I’m happy with. If that’s how you judge a camera system --- and that is how I judge a camera system! --- then this is a good system.
Overall Assessment of the E-510 and E-410, and the future
ABOVE: A particularly tall giraffe
RIGHT: Elephant shooing zebra from a watering hole.
BELOW: Zebra family. Note that the colt has a much smaller body but its legs are just as long.
BOTTOM: Bloated lions with a buffalo carcass. We saw the kill the previous night.
