Olympus SP-600UZ review: Olympus SP-600UZ

As with many things in life, expectations play a big part in whether you'll like the Olympus SP-600UZ. The two main attractions are its wide-angle lens with 15x zoom and its price; it can easily be found for less than $200. The rest of its features, which include one-press recording of 720p HD movies, 1GB of internal memory, and AA batteries, are good for the money, too. Based on looks, specs, and features, the SP-600UZ is a good deal.

6.2

Olympus SP-600UZ

$67 at Amazon

The Good

Nice features, design for its price; 1GB of built-in storage; one-touch movie recording.

The Bad

Soft, noisy photos above ISO 200; long shutter lag; ineffective image stabilization.

The Bottom Line

The Olympus SP-600UZ is easy on your wallet for a megazoom, but its photos and performance require a lot of compromise.

However, those expecting excellence at this price will likely be disappointed by this camera's shooting performance and photo quality. For the SP-600UZ, that mainly means it doesn't do well in low-light conditions or indoors without a flash and is too slow for regularly shooting moving subjects like kids and pets. If you need a camera for those things, I wouldn't buy this Olympus. Even if you're considering it for shooting other subjects, you'll probably want to read on just to be certain it'll meet your needs.

A wide-angle lens with a 15x zoom is very seductive for many consumers. Just a few years ago it would have been impossible to find a camera with the SP-600UZ's lens at this camera's price and size. Yes, you can find smaller cameras now with that kind of shooting flexibility, but they'll cost you more than $200. Despite its long lens, though, the SP-600UZ is an entry-level camera and its photo quality is typical for its class. By that I mean that it takes decent photos when it has a lot of light and you can keep the ISO setting at or below ISO 200. However, photos even at these settings look very soft and lack fine detail when viewed at anything but small sizes. Basically, if you shoot in full daylight and your shots generally go unedited and are destined for the Web, the SP-600UZ is OK. If you're willing to do a little sharpening with editing software, you'll get a bit more usability.

Sample photos:
Olympus SP-600UZ

Extending the lens, though, may require you to bump up the ISO to keep the shutter speed fast enough to help with motion blur and hand shake. (It has mechanical image stabilization, but it didn't seem all that effective when we tried it.) The problem with raising the ISO is that it obliterates fine detail, leaving you with a soft, fuzzy image loaded with yellow blotching from noise. Add in color shifting from noise and noise suppression, and the results are, again, really only suitable for use at small sizes.

Color from the SP-600UZ is generally good, at least at the lower ISOs before noise causes the aforementioned problems. The white balance isn't very good indoors; the auto leans toward warm, while the presets are cool. On the upside, the camera's Perfect Shot Preview system lets you easily see how the white-balance settings will look before you shoot. You can then just pick the one that looks best to you. There is no manual white balance.

At the wide end of the lens there is asymmetrical barrel distortion on the left side. With the lens extended there is pincushioning, though it's not as noticeable as the barrel distortion. The left side of the lens is also the least sharp, getting very soft and smeary, particularly in the corners. The center and right side of the lens are much better. Fringing in high-contrast areas of photos is at average amounts. You'll only really see it if you're viewing images at their full size.

Video quality is on par with a basic HD pocket video camera: good enough for Web use and undiscriminating TV viewing. Panning the camera will create judder that's typical of the video from most compact cameras. The zoom lens does function while recording, but you have to shut off the mic before you start shooting. In other words, you get zoom but no audio, or you get audio but no zoom.

The SP-600UZ is targeted at those who rarely if ever stray from fully automatic shooting. Its i-Auto mode uses scene recognition to decide what settings to use for the best results. Generally, it works fine. There is a Program Auto if you want to wrestle some control away from the camera; there is no control of shutter speed or aperture, though. There are 14 scene modes, too, and all the usual suspects are here such as Portrait, Landscape, Night Scene, Sunset, and Fireworks. If your subject falls under one of those modes, I recommend using it.

The Panorama mode is a highlight. You press the shutter release with the camera aimed where you'd like to start your panorama shot and it puts a circle and a target on the screen. Put the circle in the center of the target by moving the camera to the right and it'll take the next shot when it's centered. Do that once more and it'll take your three shots and stitch them together in-camera into a single 2-megapixel photo. If you want to shoot your panorama vertically or from right to left, the camera has manual panorama shooting options.

Olympus also includes a Beauty Mode for smoothing skin tone and texture in portraits and four Magic Filters--Pop Art, Drawing, Fish Eye, and Pin Hole--that let you get a little creative with your photos. You can't apply these after you've shot, though you can apply one of four color filters in Playback.

For shooting close-ups, the camera has Macro and Super Macro options. The former can focus as close as 5.9 inches from a subject, and the latter lets you get up to 0.4 inch away. Usually megazooms produce their best fine detail in their macro modes. Not so much with the SP-600UZ; when viewed at 100 percent, the results are still soft and fuzzy, and sharpening only helps if you keep the photo small.

One of the biggest issues I have with the SP-600UZ is its shooting performance. More specifically it has a pretty nasty shutter lag, which is how long it takes a camera to capture an image after the shutter-release button is pressed. In bright conditions, the SP-600UZ's shutter lag is 0.8 second. In dimmer lighting that time doubles. Shot-to-shot times aren't great, either: 2.3 seconds without flash and 2.6 seconds with the flash. From off to first shot takes roughly the same time at about 2.5 seconds. Continuous shooting is the one high point, shooting at 1.1 frame per second at full resolution and 11.8fps at 3 megapixels. However, that speed is just on par with competing models.

Were it not for the nice features and design of the SP-600UZ, it probably wouldn't be worth considering at all. The camera is comfortable to hold and use, due in part to a large hand grip with a rubberized surface. Larger hands may have difficulty pressing some buttons on the back, though, as they are small and very close together. The menu system is easy to follow and looks pretty, too, though it is sluggish at times.

The camera uses four AA-size batteries for power and can be used with rechargeables or alkaline cells. There's also a DC-in jack on the camera's left side for use with an optional power adapter. As for ports, the camera has a Micro-USB port for computer or AV out and a Micro-HDMI output. The SP-600UZ can store photos and video on SDHC cards or 829MB of available internal memory. The total amount is 1GB, but Olympus put a full, searchable user manual on the camera as well as software for organizing, editing, and sharing. It's Windows-only, but the package is actually pretty good.

The Olympus SP-600UZ is a cheap but attractive megazoom camera with a decent feature set for automatic shooters. Its photo quality is only good in bright lighting conditions, preferably outdoors, and its shooting performance is best suited for stationary subjects and patient users.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Time to first shot

Typical shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (dim)

Shutter lag (typical)

Nikon Coolpix L110

1.4 

2.1 

1.1 

0.7 

Fujifilm FinePix S2550HD

3.5 

1.8 

1.1 

0.7 

Olympus SP-600UZ

2.5 

2.3 

1.6 

0.8 

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