Olympus Evolt E-330 SLR & 10Bar Housing Review

Armed with the standard kit lens (14-45mm zoom) I headed off to see how it all works underwater. Overall feel was nice, buoyancy was perfect with my two strobes fitted – just very slightly negative. I left the optical viewfinder open (as this can’t be controlled underwater), as I had heard that the LCD screen was difficult to focus with. Well let me tell you, I have only looked through the viewfinder once and was quickly reminded of my old film SLR days - So quickly reverted to the LCD screen which is just great – bright, clear and easy to focus with.

Admittedly the 14-45mm lens is not a fantastic lens for underwater use, it doesn’t focus particularly close (approximately 50cm is closest focus with lens at 45mm) and it is a reasonably ‘slow’ lens with maximum apertures of F3.5 at 14mm to F5.6 at 45mm. So focus is a little slow in dull conditions, I only experienced no focus at 36 metres in heavily overcast conditions. But being a zoom lens it is very versatile and may suit a lot of photographers. Olympus also produce a faster 14-54mm F2.8-3.5 zoom lens.

I used the camera in Live-Mode A and had no problems with battery life. After filling a 1Gb compact flash card and a 256Mb XD card with test images on one dive, the camera took a lot of above water shots on the same battery. I have since used the 50mm & 35mm macro lenses in the housing (all use the same port). The 50mm macro lens is a joy to use, with fast focus and much better low light focusing ability than the 14-45mm (being an F2.0 lens helps) with very sharp detail in the images. The 35mm was also a nice lens, but with marginally slower focus, but I do mean marginally, it was still fast enough.
Shutter action on the E-330 was fast and responsive, the shutter lag was so small it was virtually impossible to measure.

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