Photo by Jack Howard
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Our other big gripe about the E-330 last year? If you'll recall, there was no way to disentangle Autofocus from the shutter button. There is now, with a twist. Once we got comfortable, we actually liked it. But it is a bit weird at first. When the E-510 is set to a custom setting to switch continuous autofocus from the shutter button to the back AFL/AEL button, the camera constantly searches and finds focus once you tap the AFL/AEL button on the back of the camera. Even if you take your thumb off the button, it keeps searching, which is kind of spooky. But the big Zuiko glass we were using, including the 90-250mm f/2.8, 300mm f/2.8, 150mm f/2 and the 35-100mm f/2, all have AF-stop buttons on the barrel, which freezes the autofocus. This feature comes in handy for locking focus during point service. And not having to hold the AFL/AEL button constantly for several hours is actually easier on the hand than it is with competing cameras where AF only operates when the button is depressed. Again, it's a bit of an adjustment, but it actually works quite well once you get used to it.
Autofocus feels faster on the E-510 compared to the E-330. While we're not going to say we didn't miss our fair share of shots that were too soft, we did manage to nail a lot of winners that were spot-on in sharpness, even at peak action times that really challenge a camera.
Even though we weren't doing a lot of burst shooting, we stuck to JPEG-only capture to make sure that we'd never hit a RAW buffering downtime, and we never missed a shot because the camera was chugging away. We did however miss shots because of courtside obstruction, operator-error timing, and some focus-searching, but that's par for the course with any sports action event, be it US Open Golf or US Open Tennis.
Shooting JPEG only does mean that you are hard-cooking your shots (for the most part), and since we prefer spot-metering and full-manual exposure, the occasional blown highlights in the image gallery are based upon our meterings of the court, not due to the E-510 misgauging the exposure. But blown highlights on sneakers and light-colored shirts I can live with in order to retain great muscle definition and facial expressions on a world-class athlete like Venus Williams.
We say "hard-cooking (for the most part)" because we processed our JPEGs through Adobe Camera RAW 4, which can be enabled to treat JPEGs like RAW files. True, you're only working in 8-bit space and there's already in-camera processing applied, but it's a great way to make RAW-style global adjustments prior to final tweaks in Adobe Photoshop. If you have not enabled Adobe Bridge CS3 to treat straight-from-camera JPEGs and TIFFs like RAW files, you don't know what you're missing! (In Bridge CS3, activate this under Preferences>Thumbnails>Checkbox on for "Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG and TIFF Files.)
Overall, the Olympus E-510 performed well for its camera class at the US Open. You won't be seeing many of these on the sideline of the Super Bowl or in the photo pits during the World Series, but for the Four Thirds advanced amateur photographer, it will do just as well on the sidelines of little league, recreational tennis, and Pop Warner games as many of its sub-$1,000 competitors. As it stands now, the E-510 is among the best cameras for sports on the Four Thirds platform, but we'd like to see Olympus finally bring out their long-rumored pro camera to really make the most of their impressive supertelephoto lenses for sports and safari action.
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