Sunday, January 29, 2006

Update on the Olympus IR-500

Well, now that I have had the IR-500 for about a month, I have had an opportunity to use it in various situations. here is what I can tell you about the digital "still" camera part of the Olympus;

Picture quality and detail is "ok", but not incredible. It is only 4MP, so I shouldn't expect miracles, but it does get grainy as you blow it up, and especially in low light. Since there is not manual control of ISO speed, you have to do with what you get.

Color it pretty good. I like the non-flash results better than flash, not because the color isn't good, but because the flash pictures are pretty harse and contrasty. Of course this isn't unique to the IR-500, pretty much any digital camera will produce high contrast images when you use flash. I think this just got highlighted when i saw the results that my friends 8MP Rebel XT produced without flash. They were incredible, mostly because his camera can take pictures without flash, and still use a pretty fast shutter speed. The Rebel had a 50MM F1.8 lense on it which is much faster than your usual digital camera these days. the IR-500 has a F2.8, which is about 2 F-stops slower, and consequently needed an shutter speed that is four (4) times as long to get the same picture. Movement is a big problem in low light when you needc to use 1/8 second exposure instead of a 1/30 second.

Mostly I DO like the IR-500 for video. It only runs at 15 fps, shich is certainly not as fast as i would like, but it does a really good job at that speed. Also the sound is great, and it must have automatic gain control on the sound, because it never overloads and always seems to pick up voices in the room pretty well. I have posted several videos made with the IR-500 on my main blog at "tomzimmer.blogspot.com", just look at the ones taken in December.

Finally, I still really like the way you can fold up the display and lense together to protect the camera from damage. It makes for a very rugged, transportable pocketable camera.