Olympus VR-310

Presented at the CES tech show earlier this year, the Olympus VR-310 shares a certain amount of tech specs with the Mju 9010, including a stabilised 14-Megapixel CCD sensor and a 10x zoom lens. However, its 24-240 mm f/3-5.7 lens offers an entirely different focal range, with a wider wide-angle setting.

Handling

The camera still has a bit of a plastic feel to it, in spite of the manufacturer's promise of an 'all-metal body'. Worse still—unless you're careful to hold the camera properly in both hands, you'll soon find your fingers end up covering the flash.

The controls are simple and hold no real surprises: the VR-310 has a handful of settings that can be accessed easily and relatively quickly (by pressing any button except Info), as well as the usual range of creative filters seen in Olympus cameras. There's also a separate video record button.

The general menu isn't incredibly well organised, but it does feature a handy built-in guide to help you get the hang of using the camera. It's a nice touch, but it could be more practical, as you have to keep the help button pressed down to display the relevant hints and tips.

Note that the Quick menu doesn't always remember the last setting you selected. For example, the flash re-activates itself when you change the shooting mode. Similarly, the menu systematically opens up on the shooting mode option, so you'll have to scroll down to different options every time.

The low-def 230,400-dot TN screen has limited viewing angles, especially from below. Colours aren't reproduced accurately either, with dark greys that have a blue tinge and light greys that fade to white. In any case, this screen isn't good enough for sorting through photos and deleting shots based on their colours or white balance.

Responsiveness

The Olympus VR-310 takes a little over two seconds to take its first photo, which is only just average. The autofocus is OK too, although it isn't excellent. One nice surprise, however, is that the camera takes photos very quickly in low light.

On the whole then, the VR-310 is within average for compact cameras.

Picture Quality

As we've said before, Olympus isn't up there with the best when it comes to keeping digital noise in check. Plus, since the CCD in the VR-310 is a far cry from the latest BSI CMOS sensors, we really weren't expecting mind-blowing results.


The difference in picture quality between shots at 400 ISO and 800 ISO is clearly visible on small-sized photo prints or when viewing pictures on a computer screen. Even then, though, 400 ISO shots still don't come out as perfect 8" x 12" prints.

We noticed a slight degradation in quality compared with the previous Olympus range, as the VR-310 overexposes shots, in turn making fuzzy noise look worse. There's also a slight moiré effect—which appears here as blue blotches in finely detailed areas of the graphics card on the left of our ISO test shots.

At wide-angle settings, lens quality is so-so—both in the middle of the frame and around the edges—and chromatic aberration is visible on 8" x 10" prints. At telephoto settings, the whole frame lacks sharpness.

In low light, the stabilisation system buzzes slightly, which isn't particularly annoying, it's just noticeable when you're taking a picture somewhere quiet.



We noticed something quite unusual in our Barbie tests, as the exposure and white balance proved particularly inconsistent in this camera, even in shots taken at the same speed (1600 ISO and 1/20 sec for the pictures above).

All in all then, we can think of several models we'd recommend before the VR-310. If you don't mind a a slightly less powerful zoom, for example, you should go for the Panasonic S1, or if you're willing to spend a bit more cash, you'd be better off picking the SZ-20.

Video

Video quality is mediocre to say the least, with problematic exposure and white balance, heavy fuzzy noise in dark areas of the shot, brutal transitions when the brightness changes quickly and a general overall blur. The mono sound isn't much better either, as unwanted background noise is a real problem.