Olympus i:robe IR-500

Well, I suppose it had to happen, i found another camera. This one is from Olympus, the IR-500. I haven't been able to find a decent review on the web, so you will have to live with my comments. I just bought it today, so I don't have a lot of details yet, but here goes;

Click the title for the Olympus web site.

General Specs;

4 Mega-Pixel, 2.8x optical zoon, nothing to brag about today, but high enough for lots of stuff.

Runs on a Lithium Ion battery, i haven't been able to check the life yet. (After two days, battery life seems to be ok, you can just leave it on, and it will go to sleep till you press the shutter button to wake it up again)

There is no ISO film speed adjustment, although it does appear to adjust it automatically. It gets kind of grainy in low light, so it sure would be nice to have a faster lens than the f2.8 provided.

One video feature is interesting, it will take an 800x600 video clip with sound, but only for 10 seconds. I suppose that could be useful for something, but I'm not sure what. It seems to wait on writing the video to the card until the 10 seconds is over. Kind of silly today, when you can get cards that have write speeds that are plenty fast enough. According to the size of the clips, the write speed only needs to be about 1.5 MegaBytes/second, well within current technology.

For longer video, it will take 640x480 video with sound as long as your card isn't full. This video runs at about 700 KiloBytes/second. The video format is Quicktime compatible, and are even .MOV files. Really the video is "Photo - JPEG", 640 x 480, Millions of colors, audio is "8-bit Unsigned Integer, Mono, 7.875 kHz", near DVD quality, at 15 FPS, which isn't terrible, but isn't as good for full motion as 30 FPS either. It will also shoot 320x240 video for TV quality video at 30 FPS.



Here is a picture of the camera closed up, illustrating one of it's important features. It fully protects the LCD screen and lens when closed, so you can really stick it in your pocket, and not worry about it.



Here is a shot with the screen partially open, as you can see the display swings out so the persone being photographed can see the screen. This will be useful for taking pictures of yourself, something we all need to do a lot.



Finally, here is a picture with the display swung all the way around to the back of the camera, the way you would normally use it, so you can take pictures of other people.

As you can see, there is no optical viewfinder, so that is a downside when you are taking pictures in bright sunlight. There is a brightness adjustment that should make it easier to read in the sunlight, but I haven't tried to adjust it yet. One reason I haven't tried to adjust it, is there are a lots of menus, and they don't make it all that easy to get to the brightness adjustment. You have to go to camera setup, and go down to the third screen of settings to find the screen brightness adjustment.

Other features, include a supplied docking station, which the camera slides into, and is used to transfer pictures to the computer, and to recharge the battery. A slight downside to that, is that the dock is required, not optional, so you can't charge the battery or unload pictures without it, because there re no standard connectors on the camera itself. On the plus side, the dock isn't very large, so it shouldn't cause much of a space problem.

Here is a short video I uploaded to youtube.com. It is of my granddaughter playing around with a product called FLARP, which is basically noisy playdough. the clip doesn't show the quality of the original 640x480 video, but you get the idea. Video quality really isn't bad, and the sound works pretty well too, which is not like the CAMP34, which has heavily oveloaded audio. This camera's audio definitely gets a plus.



Finally, the IR-500 screen is 2.5 inches, and is very nice, except under the brightest conditions. I ran across the IR-500 at Fry's Electronics, it was on clearance today for $129. It was too cheap not to buy. It still isn't my ideal camera, but it is very interesting. Overall, I find the IR-500 most useful for video, now if they would only get the framerate up to 30FPS.

Rating: **** out of 5