This Olympus 24x zoom camera is made for the night

The SH-2 features a 25-600mm lens backed by five-axis image stabilization and a full set of shooting options to keep your low-light photos and movies bright and clear.

Joshua Goldman Managing Editor / Advice

Managing Editor Josh Goldman is a laptop expert and has been writing about and reviewing them since built-in Wi-Fi was an optional feature. He also covers almost anything connected to a PC, including keyboards, mice, USB-C docks and PC gaming accessories. In addition, he writes about cameras, including action cams and drones. And while he doesn't consider himself a gamer, he spends entirely too much time playing them.

Expertise Laptops, desktops and computer and PC gaming accessories including keyboards, mice and controllers, cameras, action cameras and drones Credentials

More than two decades experience writing about PCs and accessories, and 15 years writing about cameras of all kinds.

See full bio

Joshua Goldman

March 10, 2015 11:00 p.m. PT

2 min read

Photographers of nighttime skies and the poorly lit, Olympus has a new compact camera for you.

The Stylus SH-2, like many cameras, has several shooting modes to improve your low-light photos and videos. To save you some hunting through settings to find the right one to use, Olympus has put them all under one Nightscape mode in the SH-2.

Under it you'll be able to find low-light options both new and old. Things like Night + Portrait mode, which uses the cameras flash to light your subject's face, but without losing the background in darkness and a Night Scene mode to help capture low-light landscapes without the use of a tripod. Joining classics like Fireworks mode, you'll find Live Composite and Hand-Held Starlight modes, which, Olympus says, "extract the brightest areas from a sequence of interval shots and combine them into one perfectly exposed image."

Also, if you decide you want video and not photos, pressing the camera's record button in Nightscape mode will get you results optimized for dark scenes.

For enthusiasts, Olympus also includes raw capture on the SH-2, so if you're not thrilled with the JPEGs coming out of the camera, you can always process the images yourself -- valuable for improving light and color noise in your pictures. You'll also find a full manual shooting mode in case you want to move beyond all the automatic options.

The rest of the camera is pretty much identical to its predecessor, the SH-1. That means you get a 1/2.3-inch 16-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, a 24x f3.0-6.9 25-600mm lens and a 460K-dot-resolution touchscreen. That aperture range is not ideal for low-light shooting with the zoom lens, but Olympus includes its five-axis image stabilization for both photos and video to help with camera movement up and down, side to side, forward and back and roll.

There is built-in Wi-Fi, too, and it's all wrapped up in an aluminum-accented body that echoes the design of Olympus' PEN cameras. An it comes in black and silver or black on black versions.

Look for the Olympus Stylus SH-2 in April for $399.99. Pricing and availability wasn't available for UK and Australia, but the price converts to roughly £265 and AU$525.