Olympus SP-320 for "creative versatility"

by Marc Perton, posted Jan 26th 2006 at 10:19AM

Wrapping up our coverage of Olympus for today, we have the SP-320, something of an outlier. A little too bulky to be a compact, Olympus is marketing the camera as offering "creative versatility." From the feature set, it looks like Olympus intends the 7.1 megapixel camera to be something of a low-end reimagining of the company's prosumer line. The SP-320 has a range of manual settings, including white balance and exposure, and has ISO settings from 64 to 800. It also has a 2.5-inch LCD, 3x optical zoom and 25MB internal memory. At $299, it's priced competitively, though we tend to think that consumers looking for a full range of manual controls might do better spending a little more for a more full-featured EVF (or even a low-end DSLR), while point-and-shooters will be happier with more compact models, including the Stylus cameras Olympus announced today.