Olympus E-410 review

It's not hard to find a £500 10-megapixel digital SLR at the moment, with Canon's EOS 400D and Nikon's D40x leading the pack and the likes of the Sony A100 and Pentax K10D not far behind.

Olympus joins the race at the same resolution and the same price, but if marks were awarded for doing things differently, the E-410 would win hands-down.

It's the smallest digital SLR yet, with a squarer body and a shorter kit lens than others. Shorter lenses usually mean less magnification, but the 28-84mm (35mm equivalent) focal length is in line with the others. Olympus manages this by using a sensor that's around 30% smaller than those in most digital SLR cameras. This allows for the lens and other optics to be reduced in size accordingly. The sensor is also unusual because of its 4:3 aspect ratio. This shape is standard in compact digital cameras, but most SLRs have a wider 3:2 aspect ratio. There's no inherent advantage to either shape, but 3:2 looks more upmarket to our eyes.

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The most unusual thing about the E-410 is that it can display a live preview on its LCD screen - standard practice on compact digital cameras, but a rarity on digital SLRs. Light entering the lens travels along a series of mirrors and appears through the optical viewfinder, only reaching the sensor when a mirror flips up out of the way to take a picture - the 'single lens reflex' arrangement that gives SLRs their name. On the E-410, though, a button on the back of the camera locks the mirror in the up position, disabling the viewfinder and enabling the live LCD preview. This makes perfect sense, because you'd never need both simultaneously. The viewfinder is better for seeing detail, and thus for adjusting focus, but the screen provides useful feedback for white balance and exposure settings.

Easy manual focus is one of the main benefits of digital SLR cameras, but the Olympus' bundled lens makes it trickier than it should be. The focus ring has an extremely long travel, making it slow to find the right position. It doesn't help that the optical viewfinder window is smaller than on competing cameras. Sadly, auto-focus is less than ideal too. It only measures focus at three points (compared to Canon's EOS 400D nine, for example), which may explain why it sometimes got our pictures completely out of focus.

Today's DSLRs are usually pretty fast, and the E-410 is no exception, with a 3 frames per second continuous mode, as long as you're using a fast memory card. The camera has slots for both xD and CompactFlash, and it's definitely worth going for the latter for its faster speed and lower cost. The start-up routine is slower than usual because it includes activating a dust filter. This is great news for anyone who uses multiple lenses, as switching between them can result in dust getting inside the mechanism and blighting photos. For those just using the supplied lens it's fairly irrelevant, so an option to disable it would be welcome.

The controls and menus are well laid out, and although there aren't many dedicated single-use buttons, accessing the key settings is intuitive and quick. There are plenty of advanced options, too, including auto-exposure bracketing, noise reduction, sharpness, saturation and contrast.

Our image quality tests revealed vivid yet natural-looking colours in a range of lighting conditions. High-contrast scenes were darker than we'd have liked, but this was easily rectified with exposure compensation. Smaller sensors often suffer from more noise, but there was minimal noise at ISO 800, giving excellent low-light shots.