Digital Home Thoughts: Dpreview Reviews Olympus E-500 EVOLT

"The E-500 EVOLT was announced on 26th September 2005, almost exactly a year after the E-300 which was the first affordable Four Thirds System digital SLR. The E-500 features an eight megapixel Kodak 4/3 Type CCD sensor, a Four Thirds System lens mount and a more traditional pentaprism viewfinder. Appearance wise the E-500 looks more like a traditional film SLR than the long and flat E-300 with its sideways swinging mirror and viewfinder setup. Improvements over the E-300 include an all new metering system, a larger 2.5" LCD monitor, better control layout and other firmware delivered improvements."



Dpreview says that it feels immediately familiar when compared to the E-300, with good ergonomics, a comfortable hand grip and a 'normal' pentaprism viewfinder mean that although its a whole new mount/sensor system it feels like a traditional SLR (and that's really important). A friend of mine just bought the E-300 a little while ago and I had a chance to play with it a couple of weekends back and I thought that the viewfinder was extremely small, something that remains a problem here in the E-500. Plus, the E-300 felt like it had a much smaller body (uncomfortably so) than the traditional DSLRs from Canon (which is what I am used to). It looks like this part has been bettered in the E-500. The E-300 was the highest res DSLR for a few months so that seemed to be its only appeal, so Olympus has had to concentrate on actual features in this camera and it looks like they have done a good job.