Today there are basically three types of camera selling regularly, those are the compact digital, the bridge camera and the DSLR. A compact digital being the hand held point and shoot that almost everyone has these days, a bridge camera being a camera that looks like a DSLR and has many of the functions but has a fixed lens and a DSLR being the professional type camera that you can change lenses on, add flash units to and adjust every setting known to man manually.

With DSLR`s you simply buy the zoom lens you choose to put on it and this can leave basically any option open to you as long as you have the funds but with compacts or bridge cameras you are stuck with the built in zoom the lens has. We have recently been watching the zoom functions go up like the megapixels did, the typical compact used to have a 3x optical zoom which has gone up to 5x and the bridge cameras used to have around a 7x optical zoom which in some units has climbed to an impressive 18x, now welcome the Olympus SP-590 UZ with its staggering 26x optical zoom.

When you consider that long zooms are traditionally used for capturing moving objects such as at sport events or perhaps shooting wildlife then the failure to focus first time is a big problem. Back to the unit itself and the buttons and controls, these are all laid out in a DSLR format and are generally ok and easy to get used to and use but they again have a very flimsy feel to them and I believe that long continuous use would see this camera fail much quicker than the better built DSLR`s.

When used in the studio with its own on camera flash I got exactly the results I would have expected...Poor! The on camera flash turns all the colours warmer than they should be and causes serious red eye in the models. Messing about with aperture settings and shutter speeds threw up more problems in that the camera seemed unable to adapt. When the shutter speed is slowed down the camera should be able to adjust the F stop to compensate but this unit failed to do so properly and left us with overexposed images and any attempt to rectify this manually seemed to leave us with under exposure, so the camera looses a few points for exposure issues for sure.

Most of the features such as face detection, the built in pre-sets and the macro settings work very well which is unusual in these types of cameras so whilst it has gotten a good few things wrong it also has to get the credit it deserves for getting a few things right. Truth be told an amateur photographer beginner to mid level would probably really appreciate this camera and its massive zoom functions but top level amateurs and professionals will be left very frustrated by it.

When you then go on to consider that this camera will set you back around £300 and a DSLR camera can these day be picked up for slightly less than that then the question has to be why would you buy this? The answer most would give would be that the cost of a zoom lens for a DSLR that could cover the same range as this camera can would be very expensive and whilst this is true you can pick up a DSLR with a decent length zoom lens capability for around £500 and you will be buying a camera that will grow with you and not that you will outgrow in months as you would this.