Product Reviews

It's easy to lose sight of the smaller players in a digital SLR market so heavily dominated by Canon and Nikon, but there's still healthy competition for third place. Olympus has been canny in giving the E-420 (and its predecessor the E-410) a unique selling point, dubbing it "the world's smallest digital SLR". It's also to be applauded for the price of the new model at a time when the competition is stealthily raising prices.

Pick it up for the first time and the impression is of a system that feels a bit old-fashioned: external controls and buttons are sparse by modern standards and the finish to the plastic body feels a bit rough and ready. You don't get the pronounced hand grip of other modern cameras, reinforcing the feel of a body from the 1980s.

The basic specification is bang up to date though, with 10.0 megapixels, a respectable burst rate of 3.5fps and an integrated anti-dust sensor-cleaning system. By default the camera does its cleaning cycle on power-up rather than switch off, which reduces its switch-on time to just over a second.

Keeping the lens compact is made easier by Olympus' lens mount and sensor combo, dubbed the Four Thirds system. This corresponds to a smaller sensor than the APS-C-sized units found in other digital SLRs, meaning focal length and thus size of the lens can be reduced. The lens supplied with the standard E-420 kit is a 14-42mm model, which corresponds to the same zoom range as the 18-55mm standard zooms of other manufacturers. There's a downside to this however, in that a smaller sensor tends to be noisier.

The E-420 is certainly a small camera, but the body itself isn't quite the palm-sized affair you might be expecting based on the sales literature. Compare it to a (now-ageing) Canon EOS 350D, for instance, and the difference in size is marginal. It's in the lens where the size savings are really made. Bolt on the standard 14-42mm kit lens and put it next to a semi-professional model like a Nikon D300 and the Olympus is dwarfed.

Capitalising on the size factor, Olympus has produced

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a fixed-focal-length 25mm 'pancake' lens for the E-420 which is only 23.5mm deep. 25mm gives a 50mm equivalent, which in the days of film SLRs was the focal length of standard fixed-focal-length kit lenses. So if you want a retro hit in as compact a body as possible, with the discipline of a fixed lens, the combination of the two might appeal. If you're used to the flexibility of modern wide-range zooms though, you'll find it limiting to say the least.

A feature that Olympus pioneered way back in 2006 with the E-330 is the Live View mode, which lets you take shots using the LCD screen in the way you'd use a digital compact. Capitalising on this is the E-420's digital-compact-inspired face detection, which (in Live View mode only) will track faces in the shot and attempt to correctly focus and expose for them.

Olympus also deserves praise for including features in the E-420 that more often than not are artificially missing from the firmware of other makers' entry-level models. You not only get spot metering but a choice of spot modes, plus there's automatic exposure bracketing for hedging your bets in tricky light, which the likes of Nikon's D40 lacks. You might have difficulty using these features though; the on-screen menu system is in serious need of simplifying.

There are drawbacks to the compactness afforded by the Four Thirds system too. As well as noise, a further price to pay for the small sensor is in depth of field. It's a fact of optics that smaller focal lengths increase depth of field for a given aperture, which makes it harder to take shots that bring out the subject by blurring the background. Depth of field is a key creative device that sets digital SLRs apart from digital compacts (the extremely short focal lengths of compacts make depth-of-field effect all but impossible to achieve) which limits the E-420's appeal for creative photographers.

As far as quality is concerned, that small sensor does mean it's wise to keep to lower ISO sensitivities, with a fair bit of detail lost to noise reduction at ISO levels above 400. Below that though, the stock lens impresses with an absence of chromatic aberrations and decent sharpness in the corners. While it may not be up to professional levels, quality doesn't ever seriously disappoint and it's certainly leagues ahead of a digital compact.

The E-420 is a rare thing these days: a camera with character. Despite being a little underwhelmed initially, after a week or so we found had become genuinely fond of it. With the price so low it's almost worth buying one as a backup to pop in your suitcase. And if you partner it with the pancake lens, you get an old-school-style fixed-lens SLR that's actually fun.