A few weeks ago I bought another camera, a new digital SLR. I had been contemplating such a move for awhile, but made the snap decision mere hours before departing on a week-long tourism with Sarah to Arizona and environs. It was about time, and the occasion provided good impetus to upgrade my kit from the Olympus C-5060 which I have been using for the past year and a half.
The 5060 was my first digital camera, and for practical purposes my first camera of any kind — although my dad gave me his old instamatic when I was smaller which I remember playing with for awhile (it's now long gone), I never really got really into photography until the last couple of years. At the time Robyn had a C-4000 which she quite enjoyed and introduced me to Olympus, which turned out to be a rewarding move. The 5060 remains an excellent camera; it offered about as much full-manual control as you could ask for in a point-and-shoot style of enclosure (with a rugged and attractive build to boot). I will likely keep it around since it will be well-suited to particular situations where a bigger SLR won't cut it — though if anyone is interested in buying, I invite your calls!
Over the course of a couple weeks and several product exchanges between a couple of vendors (morbid details spared from this story), I had the opportunity to test-drive both the Olympus E-500 and Canon 350D. These cameras represent, to me, two of the best four or five DSLR candidates at the entry level (read: affordable yet remarkably value-packed). By far most photo afficionados seem to cheer for Canon and this camera is popular amongst my photographic peers, so it was a candidate. And of course I was already pleased with Olympus so it was mandatory to try their comparative offering. Nikon is also well known for good DSLRs (as are some other well-known brands not worth itemizing here), but I chose to narrow my evaluation to these two machines.
I was pretty happy with both of these cameras; each offered its own set of pros and cons. For the sake of anyone contemplating a similar investment, I present a short comparative summary of my findings.
Olympus's new line of DSLRs employ their new Four Thirds system (a specification which covers lens format, sensor size and so on designed specifically for digital use), while the Canon offerings use a lens system compatible with their legacy EF-mount 35mm lenses. In practical terms this means a smaller choice of lenses available for the E-500 now, but those that exist are both physically smaller for equivalent performance and optically better-suited for the digital sensors. On the other hand, there is a huge existing after-market for Canon lenses, making them more readily available and generally cheaper.
My understanding is also that the kit lenses provided with the E-500 are of somewhat better quality than those provided in the 350D box; indeed, they certainly feel that way in hand. They also come with plastic hoods. On the other hand, the Canon lenses provide a mechanical switch for selecting autofocus or manual mode, where the latter disengages the motor and one can manually turn the lens to focus. The Olympus E-series lenses use a focus-by-wire method for manual focus; turning the focus ring causes the camera to electronically move the focus. The net result is about the same, but there is definitely something to be said for the manual feel afforded by the Canon lenses — although it is impossible to auto-focus and then adjust manually, as you can with the Olympus.
Another obvious difference between these two cameras is the resulting image format: the Canon cameras deliver a picture with a 35mm-like 3:2 aspect ratio, while the Olympus sensor makes a 4:3 aspect picture. I guess 35mm purists have an attachment to the former, and while I do appreciate the wide picture for landscape-style framing, besides being used to already shooting in 4:3 (as most point-and-shoots) I find the latter shape more suitable for portrait-orientation framing. Performance, on the other hand, becomes an issue in low-light situations; the E-500 uses a CCD sensor which draws more power and tends to display more and less-tolerable noise in higher ISO modes compared with the Canon, which employs a CMOS. In typically-illuminated conditions, though, both cameras do just fine.
Ergonomically, I preferred the feeling of the E-500; it seemed a little more solid and comfortable in my hand, whereas the 350D had a kind of plastic toy feel going on, with what I found to be an awkwardly angular hand grip. The Olympus also features a gigantic 2.5-inch monitor for image review (and seemed substantially faster in zooming and panning), compared with the Canon and its 1.8-inch monitor. However, one small but nice feature the 350D provides is a one-button facility to cancel a save immediately after shooting, where on the E-500 one must first play back the image before hitting delete.
Some other minor but notable differences between the two cameras include file naming and USB connectivity. Like other Olympus cameras before it, the E-500 writes files with a name in the format "PMNNDDDD.jpg", where P is an assignable letter, M and NN indicate the month and day respectively of the shot, and NNNN is an incrementing serial number. The 350D on the other hand simply names its files like "img_NNNN.jpg". If you are one to rename your files or otherwise use software that makes this irrelevant, this is a nitpicky distinction. However, I routinely make reference to photos this way (for cataloguing, sharing, etc.) and the Olympus scheme virtually guarantees a unique filename for every shot I'll ever take. For me this is a small but hugely valuable feature. On the downside, the E-500 inexplicably provides a slow USB 1.1-style computer connection (compared with the fast USB 2.0 on the 350D), but I'll be solving this annoyance with a $30 CF card reader.
In the end I decided to settle on the Olympus E-500. Notwithstanding its less-pleasing low-light performance, I found the camera to perform well and to just feel better in hand during overall use, and its value proposition more favourable than the 350D to boot. These are both great cameras though, and a photo enthusiast would do well with either.
I am looking forward to many more months of happy shooting, and resisting the urge to spend too much money on new lenses!