The Olympus Stylus SP-100 ($399.99) is another in a recent crop of bridge-style cameras that incorporate incredibly ambitious zoom ratios. Its 50x lens can capture wide landscapes and zoom in to get close to wildlife. Its got a sharp EVF and an innovative red dot sight that can help you track subjects when zoomed in. It's one of the faster focusing cameras of this type that we've looked at, but waxy image output and a lack of extra features cause it to fall a bit short of the Fujifilm FinePix S1($448.00 at Amazon). The S1 is priced $100 higher, which gives the SP-100 some appeal if your budget is tight and you can live without the S1's weather sealing, Raw shooting support, and Wi-Fi.

Design and Features

Bridge cameras like the SP-100 have the look and feel of a small SLR. It measures in at 3.6 by 4.8 by 5.2 inches (HWD) and weighs about 1.3 pounds. The handgrip is deep and comfortable, and there's a substantial thumb grip on the rear. There's no hot shoe, a feature that's not uncommon in bridge cameras, so you'll have to rely on the pop-up flash if you want to add extra light to scenes. Olympus puts one in its Stylus 1($508.00 at Amazon) (3.4 by 4.5 by 2.2 inches, 14.2 ounces); it features a larger 1/1.7-inch image sensor, but its 28-300mm f/2.8 lens doesn't cover as long of a zoom range.

The SP-100's lens covers a 24-1,200mm (full-frame equivalent) field of view, so you can capture wide vistas and zoom in to lock in on tiny details in a scene. The aperture opens to f/2.9 at the wide end of the lens and closes to f/6.5 when zoomed all the way in. Most superzooms have variable aperture lenses. A notable exception is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200( at Amazon), which uses the same 1/2.3-inch sensor size as the SP-100. Its 24x (25-600mm) zoom range isn't as long, but is suitable for most situations short of serious wildlife photography.

Olympus places the bulk of the controls on the right side, but there are a few on the left side of the lens barrel. There's a zoom rocker and the Autofocus Lock/Focus Limiter button. A press locks the autofocus at the current distance, and holding it down for a second brings up a menu that sets the autofocus system to search through its entire range for focus, or limit it to only look at close or far objects. The release catches for the flash and the red-dot sight framing assist system are also on the left, directly underneath the pop-up flash.

To the right of the flash on the top plate there's a mode dial, a control dial, the power button, and the shutter release/zoom rocker. The silver shutter release is just a bit larger than average, which gives it a little wobble when half-pressed to lock focus. But I didn't find it disconcerting in the least and found it was easy to depress fully, even if my finger wasn't perfectly centered. Right behind the mode dial, on the angled top section of the rear, there's a button to toggle between the rear LCD and EVF, and the programmable Fn button. I set it as an ISO adjustment, but you can also set it to adjust the color settings, white balance, image size, aspect ratio, autofocus mode, metering pattern, image stabilization mode, or movie image size. It can also be used to engage manual focus, set the focus limit, or magnify a portion of the frame to check focus.

The remainder of the controls are on the rear face, to the right of the LCD. These include image playback and delete buttons, the movie record button, and the Menu and Info buttons. There's a four-way joypad with a center OK control. Each of its positions has a function, and it's best to familiarize yourself with them because they are only indicated by engraved text that's near impossible to read in dim conditions. The top direction engages exposure compensation, the right adjusts the flash output, and the bottom changes the drive mode. Tapping left launches the overlay menu that runs down the right side of the rear LCD.

From the overlay menu, you can adjust most of the settings you'll want to access when taking pictures. These include the color output, flash output, exposure compensation, white balance, ISO, drive mode, image size and aspect ratio, video quality, or jump into the more detailed camera menu.

The rear display is 3 inches in size and features a 460k-dot resolution. It's fixed and doesn't support touch input, but is perfectly adequate. You can spend more money on a camera with a sharper display; the Fuji FinePix S1 has a vari-angle 921k-dot screen, and the premium Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX10($698.00 at Amazon) uses a tilting 1,228k-dot screen. There's an EVF; it's plenty sharp thanks to a 921k-dot resolution, which is noticeably sharper than the 201k-dot EVF utilized by the Samsung WB2200F($599.30 at Amazon). A wheel to the left of the EVF adjusts the diopter.

The red dot sight framing assist system comes in handiest when you're using the EVF to frame. When activated, a reticle appears in a window that sits directly above the eyecup. When you're zoomed in, you can quickly raise your eye from the EVF and center the reticle on your subject. There's a wheel to adjust the dot's position to the right of the EVF, so you can tune it to match your eyesight.

Unlike most new cameras, the SP-100 doesn't have Wi-Fi. If you're not interested in sharing images while on the go, this isn't a major concern. You can opt for a camera with Wi-Fi; the Fuji S1 has it built in. You can also use an Eye-Fi Mobi( at Amazon) if you'd like to transfer images directly to your phone while you're in the field, but it won't add the remote viewfinder option that cameras with built-in Wi-Fi offer.

Performance and Conclusions

Performance and Conclusions

The SP-100 starts and shoots in about 1.6 seconds, focuses in 0.1-second at its wide angle, and in just 0.7-second at its telephoto extreme. It can fire off a high-speed burst of 6 shots at 8.3fps, with just 3.5 seconds required to write all those images to a memory card. You can shoot at a slower 1.7fps pace for as long as you'd like. It's a lot faster than the Nikon Coolpix P600($246.50 at Amazon), which requires 2 seconds to start up, 0.2-second to focus at its wide angle, and a full 1.7 seconds to do the same at its maximum zoom. The P600 can rattle off a quick 7-shot burst at 7fps, but it locks up for 30 seconds after that and cannot be used while the images are written to the memory card.

I used Imatest to check the sharpness of the SP-100's lens. Using a center-weighted scoring metric, it records 2,604 lines per picture height, better than the 1,800 lines required to call a photo sharp. There's some fall-off in image detail at the very outer edges of the frame (1,496 lines), which is typical for a compact camera, but the lens is plenty sharp for most of its field of view. Despite scoring higher than the Samsung WB2200F (1,774 lines), our field tests showed that images captured by the SP-100 don't show as much texture; they have a waxy look to them that washes away texture, even at the base ISO. The side-by-side image above shows a pixel-level crop of the SP-100 on the left and the WB2200F on the right to illustrate the difference.

Imatest also checks for noise, which can hurt image detail as the sensitivity to light (ISO) is increased. The SP-100 keeps noise below 1.5 percent through ISO 400, and shows just 1.6 percent at ISO 800. Close examination of the images on a calibrated NEC MultiSync PA271W( at Amazon) shows that the fine lines of our ISO test sequence are still visible at ISO 800, even though there is some noticeable loss of detail at that setting. At ISO 1600 the lines from our test scene start to blur together, and are just barely discernible at ISO 3200; at ISO 6400 it's just a big blur. The Samsung WB2200F doesn't do as well here; its images are a blur by ISO 800.

Video is recorded at up to 1080p60 quality in QuickTime format. The footage is sharp, and the focus system is quick to adjust to changes in the scene. Audio comes through clearly, but the sound of the lens zooming in and out is audible on the soundtrack. There's no external mic input, but there is a micro HDMI port to connect to an HDTV, and a proprietary USB port to connect to a PC. That's also how you charge the battery; Olympus doesn't include an external battery charger, so you'll need to plug the camera into the wall with the included AC adapter to replenish a drained battery. Standard SD, SDHC, and SDXC memory is supported.

The Olympus Stylus SP-100 is one of the quicker 50x cameras that we've tested, but it's not without its issues. Its lens scores well on sharpness tests, but images have a waxy quality that washes away texture. The focus is quite responsive, and the red dot sight is an innovative framing assist tool. It's not quite as good as the Fujifilm FinePix S1, which adds Wi-Fi, Raw shooting support, and weather sealing, but it's not as expensive either. If you don't think a 50x zoom is required for your photography—and it's not likely unless you're interested in shooting wildlife—the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200 is likely a better fit, as its fixed f/2.8 lens is more versatile for low light shooting. The Olympus Stylus 1 and Sony RX10 are also standouts in this category, but both are markedly more expensive than the SP-100.

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