Olympus SP-590 UZ photos

While the SP-590 UZ certainly doesn't qualify as compact, the big grip, necessitated by the use of four AA batteries, makes it easy to handle. It's not the lightest of its competitive group, but it's not the heaviest, either.

In addition to the standard set of manual, semimanual and automatic exposure modes, Olympus includes a Beauty mode that blurs skin slightly (faces only). It only produces 2-megapixel photos, though, in addition to an untouched original at full resolution, and the overhead of the processing slows shooting down immensely.

Olympus dedicates a button--that odd one on the right--to its Shadow Adjustment Technology.

The SP-590 UZ has a fairly typical button layout, but there are some annoyances. For instance, the playback button is flush with the body and in a recessed curve by the thumb rest, which makes it kind of difficult to press.