I finally got my hands on one of the new Oly cameras and the results were a little mixed. The 510UZ is the little brother of the 550UZ that olympus just put out. I suspect these two cameras are virtually identical in most respects with the main exception being the zoom.
The 550UZ .. my thoughts after 20 minutes in the store.
1. I expected that the autofocus would be a little faster. I had toyed around with the waterproof pocket camera the other day and was completely impressed by its speed. The 510 disappointed me here as I felt it was no faster than the older Olympus SP350/500. Focusing on a low contrasting carpet for example with the zoom lens half way zoomed out yielded some pretty slow focus times.
2. My original thoughts with the 10X optical zoom (18X for the UZ550) would be that you could pretty much go without any wet conversion lenses especially the magnifying wet diopters. My disappointment was that the minimum focus distance of the lens was like 3ft. Even in Macro mode it was over a foot. Supermacro disables the zoom.
3. No hotshoe. This eliminates the TTL of the SP350/500 which I thought were a nice touch.
4. Bright capture - My initial thoughts on this are good. The camera went to ISO 4000 (5000 for the UZ550)and really allowed you to crank up the aperture or shutter speed to freeze action or get greater depth of field. I'm going to reserve final judgement when I carry my XD picture card in and take some sample pictures back and look at them on my computer. But my initial thoughts are wow.
5. write times with RAW photos. Kudos for keeping the RAW support but good grief it took nearly 10 seconds to write to internal memory. I'll try this again with fresh batteries and my own XD card but it appears this is still a problem with these cameras.
6. They completely tried to copy Canon on their menus which really frustrated me 
. I've always found Olympus Menus very intuitive and easy to use. Even after using the camera for about 20 minutes I was still lost trying to find things in the menu. Additionally some of the buttons were extremely small and hard to depress. I think this was the defining feature which made me decide to stay with my current camera. I can't stress how very difficult their imbedded menus were to get too. Very different control of the shutter and aperture in manual mode (two button pushes to change either versus 1 in my SP350).
In any case, my enthusiasm for the camera was significantly dampened and I'll invest in strobes this year. One final note, if I wanted to go through the pain of learning a complicated menu system, I'll simply change vendors and go with the Canon A640 which I found to be a delight in the shutterlag department.
