Olympus SP-350 (1 Viewer)

If you have bought or tested this new Olympus 8 MP compact, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on it. I use the Oly C-60 Zoom with 6 MP and have been waiting for the comparable 8 MP to upgrade to. This one finally has lens barrel threads and manual focus, but I wish they wouldn't have used the so-called "ergonomic" angled shutter release design.. this will make me readjust/bend my cable release bracket above the button to get the cable square to the button.
Even if you haven't seen the camera maybe you can advise about ISO and grain with higher MP cameras on the same old CCD 1/1.8" I've been told that the more MP's you record on the same size chip the more grain and thus ever lower ISO's required, which is not good in digiscoping, where light is a limiting factor. My lowest ISO is now 64, and the SP-350's low ISO is just 50.

Forcreeks said:

If you have bought or tested this new Olympus 8 MP compact, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on it. I use the Oly C-60 Zoom with 6 MP and have been waiting for the comparable 8 MP to upgrade to. This one finally has lens barrel threads and manual focus, but I wish they wouldn't have used the so-called "ergonomic" angled shutter release design.. this will make me readjust/bend my cable release bracket above the button to get the cable square to the button.

Click to expand...

I briefly tried it at a camera store on my Swaro AT80HD + 20xSW and it looks very good in terms of vignetting (or the lack of it). The entire 3x zoom range is usable with eyepieces having approximately 17 mm eye-relief (probably even shorter would do). The zoom is maximally extended at wide angle and tele positions. There is an adapter barrel available for add-on accessories, but the salesman didn't know the size of the front threads. Anyway, it should be easily attachable with the tube-style digiscoping adapters.

I can't say about the image quality in practice, but - as so many modern cameras - it looks much better and faster than the Nikon Coolpix 4500. In one review they mentioned that increasing the ISO obviously increases "grain" or noise, but that the details are not lost until at ISO400 - meaning that it should be relatively easy to post-process the noise in the range of ISO100-400.

There are also some really attractive additional features in the SP-350, like
RAW-format, a shoe for an external flash, very long possible exposure times, manual exp controls, continuous focus range down to 20 cm (+ 2 cm supermacro), histogram in shooting (!), 4 custom setting combinations.

It would be very interesting to hear about more detailed tests. :t:

Ilkka