POST 1:

78 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

Low light focusing - Olympus, do you hear?, August 30, 2007

The bad news - low light focusing. I just do not understand that. 

Here it is: below certain light level camera just struggles to get focus. That level is somewhat below standard living room illumination - so it does not bother many people in standard situations, but try to shoot at the dark bar or at the street in the evening - and change in camera behavior is dramatic. Suddenly it may take several seconds before focus is locked - way too long. Using flash to illuminate target does not help much - flash keeps strobing and strobing and strobing again and finally, when focus is locked it takes additional second to charge it for the shot. I rarely meet people who would stand still for that long... They think I made three pictures of them already, when I accomplished, well, none!

I perfectly understand the technical issue of focusing in low light, but... I am old Olympus E10 owner - and it have never bothered me much with this issue. Cheap Canon A70 have never bothered me with this issue either - well at least nobody expects performance from $200 compact camera.
May be these old cameras are not trying to get perfect focus when they cannot, may be they limiting time to some reasonable interval - I do not know, but Olympus should fix the problem. It is a show stoppers.

For now I turn off AF illumination and switch to shutter release priority in low light situations - but I need to recognize it first. I prefer to have slightly out-of-focus pictures, than no pictures at all. Olympus, do you hear?

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my mom's E510. It has been taking crappy pictures lately, and just seems to have happened one day. I played around with it for awhile, and found that it wasn't focusing properly.

If you look through the viewfinder, the camera seems to focus just fine. The picture through the viewfinder looks crisp and clear, but the picture that is taken looks worse than a 10-year old webcam because it's so out of focus. If you switch over the the "LCD Live View", you can see that after it finishes "focusing", it isn't in focus at all. If you manually focus while using the LCD View, the pictures that come out are pristine, and look just like the day she bought the camera.

After manually focusing in the LCD View, if you go back to the viewfinder view, everything is very blurry.

 POST 2:

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my mom's E510. It has been taking crappy pictures lately, and just seems to have happened one day. I played around with it for awhile, and found that it wasn't focusing properly.

If you look through the viewfinder, the camera seems to focus just fine. The picture through the viewfinder looks crisp and clear, but the picture that is taken looks worse than a 10-year old webcam because it's so out of focus. If you switch over the the "LCD Live View", you can see that after it finishes "focusing", it isn't in focus at all. If you manually focus while using the LCD View, the pictures that come out are pristine, and look just like the day she bought the camera.

After manually focusing in the LCD View, if you go back to the viewfinder view, everything is very blurry.

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POST 3:

While you can achieve very nice image quality with the Evolt E-510, out of the box I saw the same issues with the E-510 that Lori Grunin saw with the Evolt E-410. In its default settings, and with Firmware version 1.0, the E-510 underexposes and overblurs photos. Switching the Noise Filter to Low or Off will fix the blurring problem, and using a shooting mode other than Program can help overcome the exposure issues. Also, when faced with incandescent lighting, the E-510's automatic white balance tends to produce overly warm images, you're better off with the camera's tungsten preset in this situation, or better yet a custom white balance. This is somewhat strange, given that Olympus' significantly less expensive FE series cameras usually do an excellent job of automatically setting white balance.

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