The Olympus Stylus 500, also known as the µ Digital 500 in Europe, comes to the market with a 5-megapixel 1/2.5-inch CCD and a TruePic Turbo image processor. This digital camera is very much built for the point-and-shoot audience with minimal manual control and 21 automatic shooting modes. Like the rest of Olympus’ Stylus line, the 500 is weather-proofed with rubber gaskets and seals within its housing, enabling the camera to endure a few splashes, but it shouldn’t be dunked in a river. The 3.9 x 2.2 x 1.2-inch Stylus 500 has a 3x optical zoom lens that fully retracts into the camera body and is protected by a snapping lens cap. The body design has omitted the optical viewfinder and instead relies solely upon a large 2.5-inch LCD screen.

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Most people, including casual shooters, will find that the feature set of the Olympus Stylus 500 suits them just fine. Its feature set is pretty good, but it could be more complete. It has a 3x zoom lens, large 2.5″ LCD screen, movie mode, voice memo recording, a useful collection of scene modes and more. The only thing really missing are some manual controls. I expect that it should be relatively easy for Olympus to add these manual controls to a camera that already has scene modes and a user interface that seems flexible enough to support some menus for manual controls. Some manual controls would really be nice on this camera and would round out its feature set well.

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As the latest in that company’s “Stylus” line of compact digital cameras, the 5-megapixel, 3x-zoom Olympus Stylus 500 Digital is to my mind the best Stylus Digital model to date. Its body design is trim and compact, with much better-feeling controls than those found on earlier models. It offers the same water resistance that makes the rest of the Stylus line so practical for go-anywhere photography, and sports a big, beautiful 2.5-inch LCD monitor to view your photos on. While the LCD on the Stylus 500 does much better than average in bright sunlight, and offers a wider than average viewing angle, I do wish that Olympus had kept an optical viewfinder for low light shooting, as the Stylus 500’s LCD has a bit of a hard time there. That quibble aside though, the Olympus Stylus 500 is a very capable, highly portable point & shoot camera, with good image quality and a better than average lens. Its point & shoot simplicity and 20 preset Scene modes make it easy for even novice users to bring home great-looking photos.

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The Olympus Stylus 500 is as compact point-and-shoot camera that looks good, resists water, is super-fast, and has some neat features. Unfortunately photo quality isn’t as good as it should be. But first, the good news. This latest Stylus is compact (but not too much so), metal, and weatherproof. It can get a little wet, but that doesn’t mean it can go snorkeling with you — for that you’ll need the optional underwater case. The Stylus has a large and sharp 2.5″ LCD display that is viewable in both bright and dim lighting. Camera performance is very good for the most part, especially the startup speed — wow. The camera doesn’t have any manual controls, but you’ll find plenty of scene modes to make up for it. Other nice features include in-camera cropping, special effects, and albums.

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The Olympus Mju Digital 500 is a very nice digital camera - it has an excellent large 2.5″ screen, good image quality, a stylish weatherproof metal body, an excellent super macro mode, and is extremely fast and easy to use as well. The only negatives I can think of are the lack of custom white balance and other more advanced controls, the movie mode is fairly average, and the lack of an optical viewfinder may put some people off.

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