5. Features and Documentation

To truly take full advantage of all of a camera’s features requires that the camera come with comprehensive and understandable documentation—most specifically a detailed owner’s manual. Fortunately for the photographer, the E-420 has a thorough, hardcopy manual that should easily fit into a camera tote bag.

The E-420’s mode dial allows you to select from four standard shooting modes: Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter priority or Manual mode (in Manual mode you can select both the shutter speed and the aperture settings). Here are the E-420’s Mode and the Control dials—the Control dial steps through the various shutter speeds or available aperture settings.

Here are the buttons that are found on the left-hand side of the back of the camera. These buttons select the Menu, obtain information (INFO) on a particular image or display images stored on the memory cards. The E-420 has both an xD and a CompactFlash (CF) card slot. An xD card could be somewhat problematic to find in some faraway location, since few cameras make use of this memory card form-factor other than cameras from Olympus and Fujifilm. We recommend using a CF card wherever possible.

The directional pad on the back of the camera is used to maneuver through the various menus. The "OK" button is positioned in the middle of the pad, which allows you to approve your various menu selections. The documentation and feature-set of the Olympus E-420 deserve a four out of five rating.

The SP-565UZ is similarly equipped with a full-featured mode dial and over 20 different shooting-scene selections, such as candle-lit, portrait, and shooting behind glass—undoubtedly, more scene-shooting scenarios than the average photographer will likely ever make use of—but they are there if you need them. (Note that all of our test images were captured using the camera’s Program mode.)

The SP-565UZ does take a different approach to the camera’s menus, when compared to the E-420. The photographer initially sees several iconic representations of the various menu selections. Using the arrow pad on the back of the camera, you maneuver to your selection, press OK and move on to your selection. You make the necessary changes, select OK one last time and then select the MENU button to clear the screen.

The SP-565UZ has both a 2.5-inch LCD and an electronic viewfinder, which you can switch between. The viewfinder comes in handy when you are trying to make the AA batteries last as long as possible—as the larger LCD will cause the batteries to rundown faster. The SP-565UZ has a ten-megapixel sensor, with a total of five image-size selections: 10M (million), 5M, 3M, 2M, and 1M pixels. The SP-565UZ can also capture video with two different Movie modes to choose from.

The camera comes with a good, hardcopy owner’s manual. (We cannot emphasize the benefit of a hardcopy manual enough: A manual that resides on CD does you no good if you are away from home or your computer. Granted, you have the ease of portability with a CD, but you need to have access to a computer in order to read it.)

One feature we would like to see changed on the SP-565UZ is its use of the xD storage card. Since this form factor has gained little footing beyond Olympus and Fujifilm one or two other camera vendors it can sometimes be difficult to find additional xD cards for sale at some photo outlets. Transferring files from an xD card to a computer requires a card reader that supports xD cards (alternatively, images can be transferred from the camera to a PC using a USB cable). If Olympus included a simple USB-based xD card reader in the box, it would make it easier right out of the box to transfer files off of the camera. For this mix of features, we rate the SP-565UZ at a three out of five.