Product Reviews

The SP-560 UZ is an update to the SP-550 UZ, reviewed in What's New, Shopper 232. Inside the largely identical shell, the sensor has one extra megapixel and is physically slightly larger, resulting in shorter focal lengths when converted into 35mm film equivalents. Still, the 486mm telephoto setting is extraordinary and the 18x zoom range is as big as we've seen on a digital camera.

Olympus has largely dispelled its predecessor's performance problems. Focusing remains slow at the long end of the zoom, but the camera is now able to save pictures as fast as it

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takes them. Just over 2s between shots isn't dazzling, but it's fast enough. The full-resolution continuous mode ran at 1.2fps for 19 shots, but dropping the resolution resulted in faster bursts, rising to 15fps for 40 shots at 1.2 megapixels. Battery life is fantastic when using high-capacity NiMH batteries, although you'll need to buy these separately.

Image quality tests revealed a significant improvement over the SP-550. Detail was much better than the small jump from 7 to 8 megapixels would suggest, the automatic white balance coped well with artificial lighting and there were barely any signs of chromatic aberrations and purple fringing, two problems we spotted on the SP-550's photos. The Shadow Adjustment Technology feature seen on other recent Olympus cameras brightened up dark areas of high-contrast shots to reveal more detail. Face detection wasn't great at locking on to faces, but coped well with tricky lighting.

The SP-560 UZ's specifications place it in direct competition with Fujifilm's FinePix S8000fd and Panasonic's DMC-FZ18. All three are great cameras, but we'd be inclined to spend the extra on the superior DMC-FZ18.