Olympus D-510 Z digicam

I was a happy user of this digicam for over a year. It's a nice, compact, 2 megapixel, 3x optical-zoom digicam that sets out to do little and does that (little) well. It small and light so one can even pocket it. It looks like a dumb P&S camera, so it blends easily into many situations.

Interfacing issues

It speaks USB Mass Storage. Hence, there is no problem at all: Stick it into a USB port, and it lets you mount (say) /dev/sda1 as a VFAT device. So perfect interoperability with Linux (or most other Unix) is assured.

As with all mountable file systems, you have to be very careful to flush buffers before umounting. If you just unplug the camera and walk away, it can do damage. If you make such mistakes and trash the file system, the camera has a feature to reformat the flash memory. It takes a looong time, but it works fine.

In addition to still images, the Olympus shoots 15 second movies and stores them as .mov files. They work quite fine with xanim. Just avoid using vertical format, I don't think xanim supports vertical format. I just used Debian's reportbug to put in a feature request....

Broad comments on behaviour and performance

• The zoom lens is roughly 35mm-100mm. However, there is a noticeable loss of sharpness at the edges :(. The sharpest pictures are found away from the edges.
• The tripod mount is seriously crappy. The weight of the camera is unbalanced, and it tends to shake when you press the shutter.
• He has a very silly problem: If the battery is out for 30s or more, all his settings (including datetime!) are lost. I keep a set of 4 alkaline batteries in my backpack to simply stick into olie when the rechargeables come out. Be sure the datetime is correct, else the exif information gets ruined.
• For all practical purposes, non-alkaline batteries are pointless - they die in 20 frames.
• The macro performance is very good by the standards of 35mm SLR cameras, but is weak by the standards of many other digicams (which do go really close).

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