The Olympus SP-510 UZ may be the top ultra-zoom digital camera from Olympus, but its performance is far behind its top competitors. Image quality of the SP-510 is actually pretty good. Images are well exposed, show good color and corner-to-corner sharpness. Image noise is average, with low image noise up to ISO 400. Above that, ISO 800 is barely usable. Higher ISO settings are not even usable.

 

The main problem with this ultra-zoom is its lack of stabilization. The lack of stabilization forces this camera to use higher ISO settings than its stabilized competitors. That unfortunately degrades image quality due to high noise levels. Another problem is speed, the Olympus SP-510 UZ is very slow to operate. Shot-to-shot speeds are inexcusably long, potentially causing important shots to be missed. Continuous drive is a joke, it can capture up to 2 images in high-speed continuous drive and 3 images in normal continuous drive.

The bottom line is that we cannot recommend this camera since there are several superior competitors and it does not have any unique selling points. An excellent ultra-zoom camera is the Fuji Finepix S6000fd which is unstabilized but has excellent high-ISO performance and a superb mechanical wide-angle lens. Other good ultra-zoom cameras include the recently review Sony Cybershot DSC-H5, its 6 megapixels sibling, the Sony Cybershot DSC-H2, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 and the Canon Powershot S3 IS. All these cameras feature stabilized 12X optical zoom lenses, custom white-balance, full-manual controls and high-resolution movies. The only advantage of the SP-510 over these is its battery life, although the Canon S3 comes close.