Customer Reviews

Olympus D-580 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

It is an excellent camera for this price (I bought it for $250 about 2 weeks ago). Last week I used it to take pictures in Niagara Falls during day and night. The pictures during the day are crisp. During the night, I held it by hand to take pictures of rapids and the water falls (without flash). The water flow effect was surpringly clear and bright.

Its TruePic Turbo image processor is indeed very fast. I used the camera to take pictures of fireworks. During 10 minutes I took tens of pictures.

However, it is quite necessary to have four recargable Ni-Mh AA batteries with this camera. It uses battery power pretty fast.

This camera is an excellent value! It is very cheap for a four megapixel camera, has zoom, takes great, sharp, and colorful pictures! I bought this camera for my girlfriend based on what I had read about ease of use for this camera. You would be hard pressed to find a more user friendly camera in this price range or above. THe auto focus on this camera is excellent! We have taken lots of picures with this camera during the day and night and little have come out anything but clear and colorful. Two of the night photos I took of fireworks came out blurry but this is to be expected when not using a tripod. This is a great camera that has a very powerful flash and is easy to use. A word of warning would be not to even try using Alkaline batteries, they will be spent in about 20 shots. One warning, for outdoor wildlife enthusiasts, the zoom motor on this camera is very loud! Instead get one of the Lithium CR-V3 batteries which give excellent picture taking volume in this camera. I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for an easy to use, great working and low priced camera.

Several of these reviews sound like they are talking about a different camera than the one I'm using. Or they didn't read the manual and don't know how to use it. I've only had my D-580 a few weeks but couldn't be more pleased. It's compact and stylish and has Olympus's trademark sliding lens cover to protect the lens.

The sliding lens cover does seem a bit stiff, but so does the one on my Stylus 35mm camera. I've been using that for 5 years and it still works just fine. The thing you have to remember, and they tell you about it in the manual, is to close the lens cover in 2 stages. You slide it part way to the detent, the lens retracts, and then you can close it the rest of the way. I like the sliding lens cover.

The D-580 has 4MP resolution with 4 settings: SHQ, 2288 X 1712; HQ (the default setting), also 2288 x 1712, but more compressed; SQ1, 1600 x 1200; and SQ2, 640 x 480. The included 16MB xD card will hold up to 19 pictures in HQ. In SHQ, it will hold only 6. Obviously, you will want a larger card. They're available all the way up to 1GB. Using Olympus cards and the Camedia software, you can stitch together panoramas from as many as ten images.

It has several modes accessible through the menu: Program Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Portrait-Landscape, Night Scene, Self Portrait, and Movie. Most of the time you'll get the best results by using Program Auto, the default setting, and letting the camera do the thinking.

The easily accessible macro setting (there's a separate button for that) allows you to to take pictures from as close as 7 cm. The macro pictures look great and I've been using the macro more and more. And you can use the zoom in macro, allowing great flexibility. Apparently the zoom is disabled in super macro mode, which is accessible through the menu.

Speaking of zoom, it has a smooth 3x optical zoom, and 4x digital. Thankfully, the digital zoom has to be turned on whenever you want to use it. I don't ever see a need to use it, since with 4MP to work with, most of the time you can just crop the picture and still end up with resolution to spare and much better results.

The numbering system used for pictures is P + month + day + number of the picture for that day's shooting: e.g. P6070001, for June 7, 2005, picture number 1 (the year doesn't appear in the file name, but is recorded). That ensures a unique filename for each picture. One little quirk is that the date resets to January 1, 2004 if the batteries are taken out for 3 days. Not a problem, just something to be aware of. Resetting the date is pretty easy.

The included Camedia software seems fairly useful, especially if you want to do panoramas, but since it mostly duplicates software I already have, I didn't install it.

Picture downloading on the Mac is simple, and you don't even have to turn this camera on. When the USB cable is plugged in, the LCD lights up and gives you three choices, the first one of which is PC (the others are Print and Exit). You just click the OK button and iPhoto launches. The camera shows up in the finder as a drive, so it must be ejected before you can unplug it. Unplugging it without first ejecting it triggers an error message.

It is powered by 2 AA batteries, and while power consumption is heavy, it isn't quite as heavy I expected. I used the supplied alkaline AAs for about a week before they gave up the ghost. Then I switched to rechargeable NiMH batteries, and it did much, much better. I use the Monster Cable MB 4-DCRC, sold by Amazon. I prefer cameras that use AA batteries over cameras that use proprietary lithium ion batteries because AAs are cheap and available and in a pinch you can drop in some alkalines.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the D-580. Picture quality is consistently great with Olympus's new image processor (TruePic Turbo), and it has enough settings to fiddle with to keep a person amused for hours. Not that you have to -- on Program Auto, it does everything for you and does it very well. I highly recommend this camera for the amateur who likes uncomplicated cameras, but occasionally likes to dabble in creative photography.

I bought the Olympus D-580 as a birthday gift for my wife and as our initial foray into the world of digital photography. The D-580 is certainly easy enough to use and the picture quality is very good. I've made some 8x10 prints from the D-580 that look great. The controls are all very intuitive and user-friendly: you basically scroll through options on the on-screen menu. Transferring pix to your PC is a snap. With Windows XP, I just connected the camera to my pc via the included USB cable and I was ready to go - no need to even use the included software.
A few negatives I noticed pretty quickly:
1) the D-580 will demolish your AA batteries within about 20 pictures (combination of flash/no flash). After the first set of AAs quickly died, we switched to the CRV3 Lithium battery pack and got much better battery performance (or, invest in some rechargables...)
2) the auto-focus is hit and miss in dimly-lit situations, due to the lack of an AF illuminator. (This has me looking at the C-7000, but that's another story.) So, if you take a lot of indoor photos (party pix, etc), the D-580 may not cut it for you. It's hard to tell whether photos are sharply focused until they've been transferred to the computer, which has been frustrating for us and the reason I didn't give this camera another star or two...
All in all, though, I'd recommend the D-580 to anyone looking for a first digital camera or even just a simple-to-use point-and-shoot camera without a lot of bells and whistles.

My first digital camera was a Olympus D-390. It was great,but it was a fixed lens(no optical zoom). Then I tried a kodak cx6230 and really didn't care for it at all. I considerd the D-540 and Stylus 410. My wife sort of borrowed it,and seems like it very much. She likes the auto program mode and the sharp picture quality. I use rechargeable batteries and always have a spare set charged and use the LCD monitor to much to tell you how many pictures I get out of a pair of batteries. I have had this camera for a couple of months and shot over two hundred pictures and have not been disappointed.

I bought one of these as a backup to my more expensive camera, so I didn't use it much for the first 3-4 months. I took it to a company event about two months ago and the thing actually shorted out: I took a group photo and then shut the cover and when I opened the cover a few minutes later, the camera body was very warm and none of the LEDs would light up. I took the batteries out and they were too hot to touch.

For the past month I have been haggling with Olympus. They do not seem willing to perform warranty repair even though I've still got 6 months left on the warranty. Every time I contact them via e-mail it is a couple of weeks before I hear anything again.

This was my first Olympus camera and I guarantee it will be my last. Bad product, terrible customer service.

Easy to use straight out of the box. Great automatic features and has the option of manual. Over 130 photos can be taken with a 128mb card, more than enough I think. The good price makes it top in its class. Instructions are very clear and easy to understand. The software that comes with it is easy to use. Makes a great first digital camera, as it is mine.

This is my second Olympus and I really like it. Small and compact, takes great pictures. Easy to understand instructions. Great point and shoot camera. I wish the lense cover and body were a bit stronger. Lense cover seems a bit flimsy - like it may not last a long time without breaking. But we will see. I have only had it about a week. I bought the Cannon A75 and hated it and took it back. Olympus takes much better pictures and it much more amature user friendly. Cannon seems to be for the professional that knows how to manually set the settings. But if you want a great little point and shoot camera "Cheaper" than cannon, then go with Olympus. I think my next one will be the Olympus Stylus, since it is made for all weather and a all steel body. I wish I had gotten the Stylus, but it is a bit more expensive.

I have been a huge fan of Olympus cameras and I totally adore my 4-year old 2.1 megapixel Olympus D-490. I thought the D-580 would just be an upgrade to my camera because there are a lot of passing similarities between the two, but in its guts the D-580 is a horrible re-design with almost nothing good about it.

For starters, if you select anything less than the highest quality image-format, you'll find that the pictures are totally unacceptable. They are blotchy and jpegged to death. It's shocking and disgusting how bad they are. With my old camera, I would sometimes select a slightly lower quality image in order to speed up photo-taking, but that just won't work with the D-580.

The 580 is unusable without the flash, but the flash is such a bright and focussed white light that reflections often blow out the CCD and colors look washed out and artificial.

The viewfinder lens is so small that the LCD is the only reasonable way to line up a shot, but that runs down the batteries in no time at all.

The LCD is large, but has funny problems, like when the camera was pointed at a bright metal building, the whole thing appeared in reverse-colors.

The menu options are arranged in such a manner as to obscure the most simple tasks. Where my old Olympus automatically compensated for all but the most extreme lighting conditions, this camera needs tweaking for every different environment. Changing a setting involves navigating through an awful round selection-menu, followed by choices from a sub-menu and finally tuning the options in a totally separate menu.

Comparing images from my old camera to the D-580, the old 2.1 megapixel camera wins every time. Images from the old D-490 are sharper, the colors more accurate and the flash produces warm living tones.

Yes, the D-580 is small and light and it can do a lot of nice tricks, like shooting panoramas or QuickTime movies with audio. But the sacrifices aren't worth it. I can't recommend this camera for anyone. Olympus needs to re-think their consumer strategy!!

This is my first digital camera. I was looking for something that was easy to use, took excellent pictures, and wasn't too expensive. After looking at Fujis, Kodaks, and Canons, I decided to go with this one. Boy am I glad I did! The picture quality is excellent, it's really easy to use, and has enough options for a beginner without going overboard. Screens and options are easy to navigate through; you can start using this camera in no time. There were no problems getting my computer to recognize the camera. The only compliant is there were some minor problems with the installation software for the included photo editing software. The installation program thought the serial number wasn't correct even though it was. I just had to click the back button then reenter it again to get it to work. Overall this is an excellent camera, especially for only $299.99. I highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for a great point and click 4.0 mega pixel camera.