Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Olympus, DSLR, Hybrids | Themes: Digital Cameras
3. The Shadows Know
Shadow detail in captured mages can divulge a lot about a camera’s abilities. Is the camera’s imager sensitive enough? Is it necessary to increase the ISO setting in order to capture more shadow detail? This photo from the E-420 shows a bubbling fountain on a bright, sunny, cloudless day, shot with the E-420. The foreground shadows indicated a shot at 1/60 of a second at ƒ4.5, with the camera set to an ISO of 100. If you could actually see into the background detail, you’d notice that it is made up of vegetation. Not only has all color been lost from the background, but all the detail of individual leaves has been lost as well. We walked up to the background after taking this image and it metered at 1/15 of a second at ƒ4.5—a difference of two-stops.
Here’s a picture of a table setting at an indoor Halloween party that necessitated the use of the on-camera flash. The E-420’s flash had no problems picking up the subject matter, but it did have a problem with sufficiently illuminating all the subject matter in order to open up the detail of the food. We shot the image at 1/125 of a second at ƒ4.5; yet the camera didn’t generate enough illumination to properly capture all of the subject matter that was within six feet in front of it. We give the E-420 a two out of five for shadow detail.
The SP-565UZ was equally lacking at picking up shadow detail. Our test image of the white house in bright sunlight generated deep shadows in the foreground. We hoped that there would be at least some foreground shadow detail in the captured image; but when we examined the image in Photoshop, the foreground shadows were 100-percent black.
This situation also repeated with the trees in the background of the image. Even though there is sufficient light for some detail to be displayed—as is evidenced by the bright blue skies and sunlight falling on the white house—the shadow detail in the foliage of the background is also totally black.
Since the fountain we photographed with the E-420 using Program mode produced at least some useful shadow detail, we also tried shooting the fountain scene using Program mode with the SP-565UZ. This lighting situation produced an image with significantly more shadow detail than with the image we captured of the white house. Since we saw an improvement over the first image, we give the SP-565UZ a rating of two out of five for shadow detail.
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I use an Olympus E-500 and it works wonderful. While I have not used 420 I can say the the Lenses Available for it are nice lenses
i sell both models. don't forget e-420 is a d-slr, which has a much larger sensor resulting in lesser noise and higher estate of light-accepting element - the seonsor matrix. but it's an enry level model with no image stabilizer, unless you put expensive stablizing optics..
sp565uz is a universal camera with a small sensor but high versatility plus image stabilizer. but the noise levels are usually higher. and it has extremely high iso, but inly in 3mp mode.
Olympus SP-565UZ is NOT a DSLR, its a point and shoot with a huge lens (or a megazoom, if you prefer the term).
i sell both models. don't forget e-420 is a d-slr, which has a much larger sensor resulting in lesser noise and higher estate of light-accepting element - the seonsor matrix.
according to this article the Olympus SP-565UZ is a DSLR as well, which is wrong. that's a pretty silly mistake to make, anyone can tell an SLR from a non-SLR.