Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Dpreview Reviews Olympus E-330 EVOLT
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "ARTICLE" @ 08:00 AM
"On January 26th 2006 over a year since the introduction of the E-300 Olympus revealed the 7.5 million pixel 'live view' successor, the E-330. The E-330's biggest differentiation to any other digital SLR is its capability to deliver a live view on the LCD monitor (in the same manner as a prosumer / consumer all-in-one digital camera). For those new to digital SLR's this is difficult to achieve because of the mirror / shutter mechanism, the mirror is in the light path in view mode to provide an image to the viewfinder, this means that no image can be projected onto the main sensor. Additionally most large D-SLR sensor don't have video out capability. Other changes over the E-300 include a flip-out LCD screen and a range of feature improvements inherited from the E-500."
While the E-330 seems to be feature rich compared to the E-300 , it doesn't really have anything new compared to other competitor DSLRs other than the live view. Given this, it's pricing model seems to be a little out of whack -- at $1099 for the kit it's some $320 more than the Canon EOS 350D kit and worse still $300 more than the E-500 kit. So apparently, they are hoping that this high price is something consumers will shell out for the live view feature. Will you?
While the E-330 seems to be feature rich compared to the E-300 , it doesn't really have anything new compared to other competitor DSLRs other than the live view. Given this, it's pricing model seems to be a little out of whack -- at $1099 for the kit it's some $320 more than the Canon EOS 350D kit and worse still $300 more than the E-500 kit. So apparently, they are hoping that this high price is something consumers will shell out for the live view feature. Will you?
