Olympus E-330 DSLR with live LCD reviewed
When Olympus announced the E-330 back in January, the company shook up the DSLR market in a big way: the camera was the first DSLR to offer a full-time live LCD preview, something that point-and-shoot users have taken for granted for years. Now that the camera is starting to make its way to retail channels, we can get a better idea of how successful Olympus has been at making this a seamless experience -- and whether it's a good camera as well. DPReview has one of the first full reviews of a production unit and, not surprisingly, goes to great lengths to explain how that live preview feature works. Their conclusion? It's "poorly implemented," and "suffers from a noisy /grainy view in medium/low light, doesn't provide full frame coverage and doesn't represent white balance or depth of field correct." Additionally, DPreview found that the camera's image quality was a "mixed bag," and that the price -- over $1,000 with lens -- makes it more expensive than most other consumer SLRs, not to mention the 10-megapixel fixed-lens Sony DSC-R1. Despite the drubbing, the camera is still likely to find an audience among upgrading point-and-shooters, at least until competitors add live preview to their models (and we can't help but think that combining this with Panasonic's Olympus-compatible, image-stabilized Leica lens could just make this a very tempting package).
