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Olympus E-330
10bar Olympus E-330
posted by on 10/17/2006
Olympus Evolt E-330 SLR & 10Bar Housing Review
The Camera
I found the E-330 menu's easy to access, particularly the major functions like ISO speeds, F stops, shutter speeds, aperture, quality settings, memory card selection, metering, flash mode/output and exposure compensation. Most of these functions are available as one-touch to access the menu, then rotate the main dial to select the desired setting.
The E-330 has two memory card slots, one for compact flash cards and the other XD cards. This allows the use of two cards to be used alongside one another, giving the photographer a huge memory capability (a nice bonus for underwater use). Card selection is very quick and easy from the one-touch menu’s.
![Blue Ribbon Eel [strobes @ 1/2 power] Tulamben, Bali](/imgdb/articles/2006/2006_10_olympus_e330_review/002.jpg)
The large 2.5” LCD (215,250 pixels) is very easy to view from almost any angle and has nice clear/bright natural colours. It swivels out to various angles (above water) for overhead or waste level shooting.
The Live-View function has two modes, namely A & B – not too hard to remember! A Mode is a standard Live-View, all functions of the camera work including Auto Focus. The one small downfall is the LCD only displays 92% of the actual image being photographed. This is due to the technical restraints of the optics required to achieve Live-View. But in practice I found this to not be a handicap at all and quickly became accustomed to allowing for the additional 8% of coverage that was not viewable in the LCD. A Mode is what most underwater photographers are going to use.
B Mode by comparison, shows 100% of the image being photographed on the LCD. The mirror is locked-up in this mode and there is a slight delay in shutter release. Currently out-of-the-box the E-330 has no autofocus in B Mode – only manual focusing, but at the time of writing Olympus have released a firmware upgrade that enables autofocus by pressing the AEL/AFL button. It remains to be seen if this mode is of any use underwater, mostly due to the shutter delay.
Like all SLR’s, the E-330 also has a standard optical viewfinder that shows around 95% of the actual image being photographed. This can be closed when using the LCD screen in Live View mode, or left open at the risk of metering errors if ambient light enters the viewfinder. In practice I found the only application for the optical viewfinder was in very bright sunlit areas, where the LCD was lit by direct sunlight (above water). In this situation I had a better view of scene details and ability to check focus.
Olympus have also included their dust reduction system, this saves a lot of editing time later, removing dust from the final images with Photoshop. This has been a feature on all Olympus SLR’s for some time now, a very nice feature that starts at every turn-on or can be executed manually.
On the negative side, one function I really liked on the Olympus C-5050z was not easy to access on the E-330. The My Mode function on the C-5050z gave me access to eight of my own settings that were easily re-called to take me quickly from extreme macro to medium telephoto through wide angle settings by pressing one button and rotating a dial. On the E-330 I only have two My Mode's, one of these is accessible by pre-programming a one-touch button any time, but it needs to be held while depressing the shutter button. This might be OK above water, but underwater requires the use of two hands! The second My Mode is only accessible through the user menu’s and takes quite a few button presses (and a good memory) to find. This is no big deal, but a few more easily accessible My Modes would have been a nice feature and very easily built-in at production.
The E-330 has two memory card slots, one for compact flash cards and the other XD cards. This allows the use of two cards to be used alongside one another, giving the photographer a huge memory capability (a nice bonus for underwater use). Card selection is very quick and easy from the one-touch menu’s.
The large 2.5” LCD (215,250 pixels) is very easy to view from almost any angle and has nice clear/bright natural colours. It swivels out to various angles (above water) for overhead or waste level shooting. The Live-View function has two modes, namely A & B – not too hard to remember! A Mode is a standard Live-View, all functions of the camera work including Auto Focus. The one small downfall is the LCD only displays 92% of the actual image being photographed. This is due to the technical restraints of the optics required to achieve Live-View. But in practice I found this to not be a handicap at all and quickly became accustomed to allowing for the additional 8% of coverage that was not viewable in the LCD. A Mode is what most underwater photographers are going to use.
B Mode by comparison, shows 100% of the image being photographed on the LCD. The mirror is locked-up in this mode and there is a slight delay in shutter release. Currently out-of-the-box the E-330 has no autofocus in B Mode – only manual focusing, but at the time of writing Olympus have released a firmware upgrade that enables autofocus by pressing the AEL/AFL button. It remains to be seen if this mode is of any use underwater, mostly due to the shutter delay.
Like all SLR’s, the E-330 also has a standard optical viewfinder that shows around 95% of the actual image being photographed. This can be closed when using the LCD screen in Live View mode, or left open at the risk of metering errors if ambient light enters the viewfinder. In practice I found the only application for the optical viewfinder was in very bright sunlit areas, where the LCD was lit by direct sunlight (above water). In this situation I had a better view of scene details and ability to check focus.
Olympus have also included their dust reduction system, this saves a lot of editing time later, removing dust from the final images with Photoshop. This has been a feature on all Olympus SLR’s for some time now, a very nice feature that starts at every turn-on or can be executed manually.
On the negative side, one function I really liked on the Olympus C-5050z was not easy to access on the E-330. The My Mode function on the C-5050z gave me access to eight of my own settings that were easily re-called to take me quickly from extreme macro to medium telephoto through wide angle settings by pressing one button and rotating a dial. On the E-330 I only have two My Mode's, one of these is accessible by pre-programming a one-touch button any time, but it needs to be held while depressing the shutter button. This might be OK above water, but underwater requires the use of two hands! The second My Mode is only accessible through the user menu’s and takes quite a few button presses (and a good memory) to find. This is no big deal, but a few more easily accessible My Modes would have been a nice feature and very easily built-in at production.
The Lenses
![Pixie Hawkfish in Crinoid [strobes 1/2 power] - Tulamben, Bali](/imgdb/articles/2006/2006_10_olympus_e330_review/003.jpg)
In use I found the standard 14-45mm kit lens to be great for above water use, it focused fast and produced sharp images, I also added a 40-150mm telephoto zoom for above water photography and a 50mm macro for underwater use. There are also currently an 8mm, 35mm macro and a fast 14-54mm lenses available.All of the above lenses are the Zuiko Four Thirds (4/3) system lenses, these lenses are specifically designed for the sensor size used in the ‘E Series’ Olympus digital SLR cameras and their focal lengths need to be doubled to give a comparison to the old 35mm SLR lenses – so for instance the Olympus Zuiko 50mm macro is equivalent to a 100mm macro lens on a film SLR, in terms of image area and angles of view. Of these lenses I found the 50mm macro to be the sharpest and also had a great ability to focus in dull lighting conditions. Sigma are also producing lenses to suit the Olympus mounts.
The LCD playback functions of the E-330 offers seven image detail options. The first three options give a full-screen size images with basic file number, quality and date functions. The fourth shows a smaller image on the LCD with the auto focus point, quality setting, four separate colour histogram graphs and detailed exposure information. The fifth is a full screen size image overlaid with a large histogram graph. The sixth & seventh are full screen size images with highlights and shadows flashing, these indicate potential over or under exposure in the image. Each of these playback screens have their applications and can be quickly scrolled through by pressing the Info button.
The camera produces nice JPG images, with various options for quality, colour and compression - plus it also produces RAW images with the option of an accompanying JPG image.
The Software
I shot RAW for my tests, but found the software that came with the camera too clumsy to use for RAW processing and opted to wait for Adobe to release an updated camera RAW plug-In that supports the E-330 camera for Adobe Photoshop CS2. This was released at the end of June 2006 as a free download and works very well.
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