The Olympus Stylus 500 is a relatively new digital camera to hit the market. A standard point-and-shoot camera, it's loaded with features, produces great photos and has excellent optics. What stood out to me as I played with the Olympus Stylus 500 was that it has up to 23 shooting modes and is PictBridge-compatible to connect directly to supported printers.

The Olympus Stylus 500 digital camera

On the downside, this digital camera has only a 5 megapixel resolution and has slightly noisy pictures sometimes. Not really big issues, but certainly something you want to think about before buying the product.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the features of the Olympus Stylus 500 in this article.
 

Design and Construction

The Olympus Stylus 500 measures 3.9" by 2.19" by 1.22" (WHD). The silver body itself is well constructed and has a pretty nice, sturdy feel.
The design is also quite ergonomic - making the digital camera easy to hold steady for shooting pictures. Weighing in at 0.63 pounds and boasting a small and compact size, I'd say the Olympus Stylus 500 is one well-built digital camera.
 

Optics and Resolution

The Olympus Stylus 500 features an excellent optical system. It employs a built-in proprietary optical viewing system, allowing
a good 5.4 megapixel resolution. Those of you who need to take shots at telephoto range will want to check out the 3x optical zoom to make sure it suits your requirements.

I had the opportunity to take some test pictures from this digital camera. The resulting pictures displayed very nice color tone and brilliance - so in a word, this Olympus Stylus 500 takes very nice photos.

For those interested, the Olympus Stylus 500 has an ISO range of Auto, 64, 100, 200, 400, an aperture range of f3.1/f5.2 (wide/tele), as well as shutter speeds from 4 - 1/1000 sec. For most day-to-day shooting, I'd figure that the built-in auto mode will more than suffice.
 

User Controls

One of the things I look for in a digital camera is the user friendliness of its controls. In this respect, the Olympus Stylus 500 has very friendly and intuitive controls. The 2.5 inch LCD screen is bright and clear,
and gives access to its various menus. The menus themselves are legible and logically clustered - making navigation though
controls and pictures a breeze.

This digital camera unfortunately does not come with manual controls - much to my disappoint. Sometimes I might want to play with some manual options to inject more creativity into some photos. The Olympus Stylus 500 also comes with a decent movie mode. I enjoyed taking small video clips and sharing them with friends and family.
 

Battery Life

If you're worried about battery life, then take note that the Olympus Stylus 500 makes use of proprietary lithium batteries. The battery life is pretty good - I managed to going through hundreds of photos before draining the battery. The advertised life of this digital camera is 240 images.
 

Storage and Transfer

The Olympus Stylus 500 accepts xD picture cards. In general, I'd advise you to fork out more money to buy a bigger storage card (e.g. a 512MB card), given the 5.4 megapixel resolution. Image transfers are done via a USB 2.0 interface, so you can be assured that your image download times are minimal.
 

Shortcomings

The Olympus Stylus 500 is a great camera. However, there are a two problems which need to be highlighted. Firstly, this digital camera has only a 5 megapixel resolution - this might be a problem if you want to print large format photos. Next, it also has slightly noisy pictures sometimes, especially under low light conditions.


Conclusion

In summary, the Olympus Stylus 500 delivers superb, fast performance and shoots very nice images. It is reasonably priced for a digital camera with its feature set, and should be placed high on your shopping list if you’re in the market for a standard point-and-shoot digital camera.

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