Olympus E-420 review

The E-420 is the lightest and smallest camera here by quite a margin, but it's still comfortable to use.

Our only gripe is that the ring for the neck strap falls under the fingers when grasping the camera, which is a little uncomfortable. We tested it with the 14-42mm lens, which gives a slightly wider angle than usual, ideal if you often need to shoot buildings or groups from close quarters.

This is the most affordable camera here with live view. It's useful for previewing white balance and manual exposure, but there's no digital zoom for accurate manual focusing on the LCD. There's also a delay of up to two seconds when capturing a photo in this mode, so we rarely found it preferable to the viewfinder. Continuous shooting was extremely fast, running at 3.32fps until the card filled up. It slowed to 1.78fps after 10 shots when in RAW mode, but this is still much faster than the others. However, the Olympus took over a second to switch on and capture a photo, partly due to its relatively slow autofocus performance.

Adjusting settings was a little slower than on other cameras, too. All the key photographic controls are shown together on the LCD screen and adjusted with the navigation pad and command dial, but this isn't as fast as using dedicated buttons. We found manual focus a little fiddly, with a relatively small viewfinder and an overly long travel on the focus ring, which felt disorienting.

Image quality gave us less cause for concern. Photos were detailed and auto exposures well balanced. Colours were a little less saturated than with the other cameras on default settings, but this is easy to adjust. There was no sign of chromatic aberrations, where primary colours don't quite line up perfectly - something all the other cameras suffered from to some extent towards the corners of high-contrast shots. Noise levels were reasonably low, although not as low as from the Canon or Nikon. Sadly, there's no image stabilisation to counteract blur due to camera shake in low light, something all the other cameras here offer.

The E-420 has a lot going for it, and it's very reasonably priced too.

Author: Ben Pitt