I need Olympus advice!

Decos

Has anyone here any experience of the Olympus e500 digital slr camera and if so, would they recommend it to a person who wants a decent slr at the right price but isnt going to get too deep inot photography?

Is it hard to get lenses for the Olympus slr's?

Any help appreciated, my brother is thinking of getting one soon.

Thanks lads & lassies

nilhg

I had an E500 and currently have an E510, the E500 is a fine camera for its time, though it's lacking in some features compared to the current generation of models. Its main weakness is noise at anything above ISO 400, though it would still be better than most compacts. If most of your shooting is going to be in goodish light then I would say go for it.

No problem getting Oly fit lenses, as long as you don't expect to be able to walk into your local camera shop and find them on the shelf, and the lenes themselves, even the standard ones, are widely acknowledged as being top quality.

Click Clicky

I started off my Olympus collection with the e500 and never looked back. The lenses are unparalleled, particularly the f2 zooms. I gave the e500 to a friend, and now have 2 x E3s, 1 x 520, the 7-14mm, the 14-35mm f2, the 35-100mm f2, the 50mm f2 macro, the 50-200mm 2.8 all from the pro or super pro range, and the 9-18mm and the 14-54 from the mid range. The longest wait I had was about 2 weeks for the 14-35. The rest were off the shelf or 2 day postage.

As for not getting too deep into photography? Good luck with that. You'll fall in love with it and won't look back.

kumate_champ07

e500 is noisy at medium iso's and above so its not great for irish weather or concert photography. i had an e510 but sold it because iso800 was ugly and i needed a clean iso 1600, and the autofocus in low light was bad, so i went with canon instead.

there are pros and cons for olympus, it depends what you want to use your camera for. if i had the spare cash id buy an e620 as a travel camera with the 50mm macro. the kit lenses are nice, best of any manufacturer. but if you want to buy their better lenses its gonna cost you.

try find an e510 or e520 or maybe a 410 cheap on ebay. the e410 is smaller and cheaper than the e510 but lacks image stabilization, it has the same image quality at a cheaper price. but you wont want to use over iso800, terrible banding and noise.

houseoffun14

A good friend of mine uses an Olympus E500 series camera and I have to say the noise on the files is awful.

As some one who started out with an Olympus OM10 I find it sad how much Olympus have fallen behind, Canon, Nikon and others in the DSLR market.

kumate_champ07

houseoffun14 wrote: »

A good friend of mine uses an Olympus E500 series camera and I have to say the noise on the files is awful.

As some one who started out with an Olympus OM10 I find it sad how much Olympus have fallen behind, Canon, Nikon and others in the DSLR market.

have they really fallen behind or remained in the same place?
olympus where the 1st to put live view in dslr and micro vibration sensor cleaning to remove dust particles.

i think they have some nice cameras at great prices but they wont do everything you want and thats a problem for some. id like to see where they go with micro 4/3's, tho the problem is the best lenses will always be heavy(for the near future anyway)

the sensor size they choose has limited them but i dont see why they cant offer a clean iso 1600 with 10-12mp when a slightly bigger canon sensor can do a clean 15mp iso1600.
dept of field and bokeh potential is also effected by the 2x crop factor