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  • Introduction

  • Tour

  • Ease of Use

  • Size & Handling

  • Auto Mode

  • Movie Mode

  • Playback Mode

  • Custom Image Presets

  • Drive/Burst Mode

  • Other Modes

  • Manual Controls

  • Focus

  • ISO

  • Aperture & Shutter Speed

  • White Balance

  • Exposure & Metering

  • Image Stabilization

  • Picture Quality & Size Options

  • Picture Effects

  • Other Controls

  • LCD & Viewfinder

  • Flash

  • Lens & Sensor

  • Jacks, Ports & Plugs

  • Battery

  • Memory

  • Conclusion

  • Sample Photos

  • Specs

  • Introduction
  • Tour
  • Ease of Use
  • Size & Handling
  • Auto Mode
  • Movie Mode
  • Playback Mode
  • Custom Image Presets
  • Drive/Burst Mode
  • Other Modes
  • Manual Controls
  • Focus
  • ISO
  • Aperture & Shutter Speed
  • White Balance
  • Exposure & Metering
  • Image Stabilization
  • Picture Quality & Size Options
  • Picture Effects
  • Other Controls
  • LCD & Viewfinder
  • Flash
  • Lens & Sensor
  • Jacks, Ports & Plugs
  • Battery
  • Memory
  • Conclusion
  • Sample Photos
  • Specs

Introduction

Tour

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Ease of Use

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The Olympus SZ-10 is a part of the company's point & shoot line-up, and they've had a long time to perfect the art of hand-holding new users. In addition to a slew of auto modes, the camera has a prominently placed feature called In-Camera Help Guide. Push the button, and you're presented with six options: Search by Purpose, Search by Solution, Search by Situation, Learn About the Camera, Search by Keyword, and History. We had some questions about how to use the new 3D mode, so we tried searching by keyword = 3D, and voila, there was a great tutorial on how to use 3D mode. We were impressed.

More experienced users might bemoan the lack of dedicated buttons on the back of the camera. Almost everything has to be done through the menu using just the scroll wheel. If you consider yourself in this camp, perhaps the Olympus Pen series might be more up your alley.

The menu on the Olympus SZ-10 is split into two basic portions, a "shooting menu" in which options appear left aligned over a live preview, and a full-screen menu with a slew of other settings. The shooting menu is fast enough, but all your interface has to be down through the tiny scroll wheel, which feels a bit cheap. It's easy to overshoot or undershoot your intended selection as you whiz through options. This is not a camera for quick shooting situations where you want to constantly change settings.

Size & Handling

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The Olympus SZ-10 feels incredibly light, though the ultrazoom lens and grip make it a little large for fitting in a pants pocket. Perhaps a coat pocket or a purse is more appropriate. The right-hand side is made of a hard plastic (even if it looks like rubber in the photo), but the texture is such that it provides a decent enough grip.

If you have ruler handy, here are the specs: 4.2" x 2.6" x 1.5" (105.9 x 67.3 x 37.9mm) and 7.58 oz (215g) without battery or card. Feel free to make a paper cut-out version and see if fits in your pocket.

Auto Mode

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The Olympus SZ-10 is truly built for auto mode-style shooting. There are lots of features that would fall under the general description of "auto mode," but there's no exterior button that puts the camera in a dummy mode – something you do see on a lot of other point & shoot cameras. Instead, you use the shooting menu to put the camera in iAuto mode, short for Intelligent Auto. In this mode, you can only set up a shutter delay of 2 or 12 seconds. All the other options are turned off.

In other modes, like Scene mode shooting, you simply choose your shooting situation, like Night shooting or Fireworks, and the camera does the rest. There are a number of such modes.

Movie Mode

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The Olympus SZ-10 shoots HD video at a maximum resolution of 720p (1280 x 720 at 30fps). You can manually lower the resolution to VGA or QVGA if you need to save space on your media card. Limited to 720p, rather than 1080i or 1080p, definitely puts the SZ-10 at a disadvantage compared to a lot of Canons and other point & shoots.

Playback Mode

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Playback mode on the Olympus SZ-10 is simple enough, and uses on of the few physical buttons on the back of the camera. In playback mode, you'll see all the EXIF data, as well as a histogram indicating exposure levels. You can also do basic editing in the camera, like cropping and rotation.

Custom Image Presets

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There are a number of preset modes on the Olympus SZ-10. Scene modes include: Portrait, Beauty, Landscape, Night Scene, Night + Portrait, Sport, Indoor, Candle, Self-Portrait, Sunset, Fireworks, Cuisine, Documents, Beach & Snow, Pet Mode - Cat, and Pet Mode - Dog.

Drive/Burst Mode

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The Olympus SZ-10 has two drive modes. Unfortunately, we can't tell what they are. Sorry, folks. Move along, nothing to see here.

Other Modes

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The Olympus SZ-10 is one of a few new point & shoots for 2011 that feature 3D still photo capability. At this point, it's clearly more of a gimmick than a reliable or useful tool, but a fun gimmick nonetheless. It works by taking two photos in close succession, the latter slightly offset from the first. The photos are then digitally composited into a single image file, and it's that offset distance between the two images that creates the 3D effect. Because the Olympus SZ-10 does not have a 3D LCD screen, there's no way to determine the efficacy of the 3D effect until you look at it on an external 3D screen. The camera can output the image over HDMI 1.4, or you can pop it into a compatible TV's media card slot.

The other major feature is in-camera panorama shooting. Once you put it in the correct mode, you simply hold down the shutter and slowly pan the camera across your scene. It takes three pictures and stitches them together. Using the included software, you'll be able to stitch up to 10 images together.

Manual Controls

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The Olympus SZ-10 has few manual controls, which is not unusual for a camera in the $250 price range. Still, though, it's not ideal if you're looking for a camera you can grow into. There are options on the camera for exposure compensation, white balance presets, macro focus, and ISO.

Focus

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There is no manual focus on the Olympus SZ-10. However, it does have a Face Detection for up to 16 faces, as well as an AF Tracking that allows you to lock onto an object as it moves around the frame.

ISO

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The Olympus SZ-10 allows you to set the ISO at 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, or 1600. There's also an ISO High setting, but it's not clearly how high that really is.

Aperture & Shutter Speed

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The Olympus SZ-10 has no manual aperture or shutter controls. It's all automatic. The lens has a minimum aperture of f/3.1 - 4.4.

White Balance

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There are several white balance presets, but you cannot create a manual white balance or dial in a specific temperature. Presets include: Sunny, Cloudy, Incandescent, Fluorescent, and Auto.

Exposure & Metering

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The Olympus SZ-10 allows you to make exposure compensation shifts of +/-2EV in 1/3 stops. You can also change the metering mode between between Digital ESP and Spot.

Image Stabilization

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The Olympus SZ-10 has two stabilization modes: a mechanical sensor shift and a digital stabilization. When you're talking about a lens that can extend from 5 -90mm (20 - 504 in 35mm equivalent), you definitely need reliable stabilization. The sensor shift is preferable, because it has no negative effects on image quality. You can turn the digital stabilization on, but that process is done on the sensor itself, and can reduce image quality.

When we tried the camera out on the show floor, the stabilization seemed to work fairly well. Shooting at maximum zoom, about 60% to 80% of our shots came out looking sharp, at least on the LCD screen.

Picture Quality & Size Options

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The Olympus SZ-10 shoots up to 14MP, with several lower resolutions. You can also select Normal or Fine quality for each resolution, which affects the JPEG compression.

Picture Effects

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There are a number of picture effects on the Olympus SZ-10. The Magic Mode list of options which offers the more "creative" effects, for lack of a better term: Watercolor, Pop Art, Pinhole, Fish Eye, Drawing, Soft Focus, Punk, and Sparkle. We recommend you use these sparingly, as you can never convert a picture with Watercolor effect back to a normal photo, but you can always make a normal photo watercolor-ish at a later point.

Other Controls

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The Olympus SZ-10 has a feature called Shadow Adjustment Technology, a post-processing feature that examines the amount of shadow in an image, then shifts the gamma if necessary. It can be turned on and off.

LCD & Viewfinder

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The Olympus SZ-10 has a 3-inch LCD with a 460,000-pixel resolution. The camera does not have a touch screen, like many of its competitors, and it's hard to say if that's a disadvantage. The scroll wheel on the Olympus SZ-10 is definitely not one of its strongest features.

The Olympus SZ-10 has no viewfinder.

Flash

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The Olympus SZ-10 has a pop-up flash located directly above the lens. There are four modes for the flash: Forced, Fill, Red Eye Reduction and Auto. The flash has a range of 1.97 feet to 23.3 feet in Wide, and 5.25 feet to 16.45 feet in Tele.

Lens & Sensor

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The Olympus SZ-10 has a non-removable f/3.1 - 4.4 lens. The camera is resoundingly in the ultrazoom category, extending 18x, from 5 -90mm (20 - 504 in 35mm equivalent), which causes the lens to stick out several inches from the body.

Inside is the TruPic III image processor and 14MP, 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

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The Olympus SZ-10 has just a few ports. On the bottom, you'll find the a pop-up door that covers the thin battery and media card slot. On the right side there's a hard plastic port cover that reveals mini-USB and mini-HDMI. The USB is also used for the AV output function.

Battery

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The Olympus SZ-10 has a Li-ion battery that loads from the bottom. It's rated for 220 shots.

Memory

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The Olympus SZ-10 uses SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards up to 32GB in capacity. There is also 59MB of internal memory, should you forget your card or fill it up. The camera is Eye-Fi compatible, making it possible to transmit photos over WiFi to another device.

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Conclusion

The Olympus SZ-10 ($249 MSRP) is, in essence, an entry-level camera with some bonus feature thrown on top. We readily admit that 3D shooting sounds fun, but we'd like to see an option for manual shutter control even more. We're also skeptical about the quality of the 3D pictures, as our network of sites (including CamcorderInfo.com and TelevisionInfo.com) has quite a lot of experience in this area and knows how incredibly difficult it is to capture a convincing 3D image.

Overall, the Olympus SZ-10 has a lot of curb appeal with its big banner special features. We don't have much faith in the 3D or panorama features, but the image stabilization seems to compensate well when shooting at the zoom extremes. The 720p video could have been upper to 1080i, and there's plenty of alluring competing models if this is important to you. We remain skeptical but intrigued.

Sample Photos

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Specs

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Meet the tester

David Kender

David Kender

Editor in Chief

@davekender

David Kender oversees content at Reviewed as the Editor in Chief. He served as managing editor and editor in chief of Reviewed's ancestor, CamcorderInfo.com, helping to grow the company from a tiny staff to one of the most influential online review resources. In his time at Reviewed, David has helped to launch over 100 product categories and written too many articles to count.

See all of David Kender's reviews

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