Olympus E-420 & 14-42mm lens review

Olympus's E-420 is the smallest and lightest digital SLR currently available.

This is partly down to its sensor, which is around 25 per cent smaller than those used by the other cameras and allows the lens and other components to be reduced accordingly. Sadly, there's no room for optical image stabilisation in the body or lens, and the smaller optics result in a smaller viewfinder image.

It's great to see live view on a DSLR costing less than £300, and its benefits have been fully exploited. White balance, exposure compensation, manual exposure settings, metering modes, contrast and saturation settings are all reflected in the preview image. A momentary 7x or 10x digital zoom allows accurate manual focusing, although it could be better signposted.

Live view makes it possible for Olympus to include face detection - this is the first DSLR to do so. It proved reasonably adept at spotting faces and ignoring bright or dark backgrounds to give pleasing skin tones. However, although it used time-consuming contrast detection to focus on a face, it insisted on double-checking with the three-point autofocus system before taking a photo, which sometimes hindered rather than helped matters. Various live view autofocus options are available in the advanced settings menu, but none resolved the issue.

A Gradation control includes High Key and Low Key options to retain shadows at the expense of highlights, or vice versa. An Auto option managed both at once by lowering the exposure settings to retain highlights and boosting the brightness of shadows with digital processing. This made shadows a little noisier, but otherwise it was highly effective. It's surprising this feature isn't better advertised - a more revealing name than Auto Gradation would help.

Continuous performance was excellent, running at 3.3fps indefinitely in JPEG mode and for 10 shots in RAW mode, whereupon it slowed to a still-excellent 1.8fps. Flash recycling times were fast, too, with just 0.7 seconds between shots. Start-up and autofocus times were disappointing, though, and the camera relies too much on its screen for selecting and adjusting key settings. It's not as fast in general use as most of the others here. The command dial is unresponsive when spun quickly, with the number of steps not matching the amount of adjustment.

Our image-quality tests revealed no serious flaws, but colours were erratic at times. Details were sharp in bright conditions, but less so in low light at ISO 400 and above, when noise reduction processing had to work harder. This processing can be set to four strengths, but when shooting in RAW mode the smaller sensor dimensions resulted in noisier pictures than elsewhere.

None of the E-420's problems is fatal, but even at this price there are better alternatives.