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| Photo by Jack Howard |
All the photos were shot with a pair of Olympus E-510 cameras set to Continuous focus, low ISOs, spot metering, full manual exposure mode, SHQ-quality JPEGs, with top of the line Olympus lenses at or near maximum aperture to give good background separation and provide peak-action freezing shutter speeds. We're not going to give the tech specs for each shot -- but instead we offer some pointers and self-critiques to help you shoot better tennis.
Click photo for more field test images. |
Last year, Olympus invited me to test some of their premium glass at the US Open. If you remember, I loved the lenses, but was disappointed with the performance of the Evolt E-330. A year later Olympus has released a new advanced enthusiast camera, the 10-megapixel E-510, and while it doesn't perfectly address all my complaints from last year, it's a major improvement over the Evolt E-330 for sports action.
Mind you, the E-510 can't perform at the level of a Nikon D3 or a Canon EOS 1D Mark III. But then again, those cameras cost more than face value for courtside seats during the singles finals (and don't even talk to us about the secondary market for these tickets!). The E-510 (body only), on the other hand, ships for just under $800, and competes in price and performance with the Canon EOS Rebel XTi and Nikon D40x, which both performed very well in our lab tests. Lab results are extremely important to us, but so is real-world, challenging photography situations to see how a camera really handles under pressure. And for a sub-$1,000 camera, The E-510 did very well, as the photo gallery shows.
Keep in mind this is a Four Thirds camera, meaning that its lenses have a ton of effective reach due to that 2x sensor factor. A 600mm f/2.8 that can be handheld for night sports? I'll take that in a heartbeat! Sure, you say it's really just 300mm and lens factor is marketing myth, but think about it like this: If you have a 300mm f/2.8 lens on the E-510, and a 300 mm f/2.8 on a Rebel XTi with its 1.6x sensor and a Canon EOS 5D with its full-frame 12 megapixel chip, you'd still have to crop in on both the XTi and 5D shot to get the same tight framing on a player on the far baseline -- dropping pixels and output resolution along the way. So even though the fullframe 5D starts out with more pixels, there's more dead space to crop out to get the same tight framing as with the 2x factor. And your output image will then be less megapixels than the tight framing of the effective 600mm reach of the E-510. The Rebel XTi, which starts at 10 megapixels, would shed less pixels overall than the 5D, but still wouldn't be full resolution for the same effective 600mm framing. Of course, your depth of field is more like a 300mm f/2.8 than a 600 f/2.8, but for reach and light-gathering power in a relatively compact package, we'll take it! (And when you do have to crop in with the E-510, it's not as much as you'd have to with a similar focal length lens on a 1.6x or 1.3x camera, if that makes sense.)
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Our single biggest gripe? If you'll recall from last year, it was burst rate.
It still is.
It's better, but not spectacular. It's on par with the Canon EOS Rebel XTi and Pentax K10D at 3 fps for a bunch of shots -- but none of these are pro-level speed demons. So we had to slow down, wait for the right moment, and rely on intuition and experience to nail winners on the first shot rather than swing through each play with a blast of machine gun shots at near-video capture burst rates.
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