Olympus SP350 + PT-030 case

I now reckon this camera is definetely not for me. I consider it totally useless for underwater photography.

Let me explain again in case I can save anyone else any grief-

In manual mode when the shutter speed and aperture are altered the LCD darkens or lightens accordingly. The trouble is that for a lot of aperture and speed settings that I wish to use for close up flash photography, the screen is too black to even see what you are trying to take a picture of. Now is that crap or what! Does any other camera behave like this?

For macro I would invariably want to choose f8 for maximum depth of field and then crank the speed up to around 1/500 sec. The LCD is almost totally black with these settings. I guess if all you want to use is one of the automatic shooting modes the camera might be OK

I have contacted Olympus UK technical support and they have confirmed that there is no way of switching this feature off. They are not aware of any other model which behaves like this. There appears to be nothing in the menu to get around this feature. I can only think that this is a real design blunder by Olympus.

If you are considering this model I would check this out first to see if you can live with dreadful feature. If you have already bought the camera it would be useful to hear if you agree with my assesment.

Trevor - I just tried out what you said and you are correct. The only saving grace is that when you depress the shutter button halfway to focus the LCD does brighten for about 1 second to give you an idea of what you're taking a picture of. I agree this is a problem...especially under the water. My question to you, because I'm new to this is, how often do you use that f stop and shutter speed combination under the water? PS..I'll keep looking through the advanced manual to see if there's a quick fix and let you know. Thanks for the information!

Well scanning the literature was not helpful on this issue. It appears Olympus didn't even address it. The closest thing they had was to turn on the AF illuminator. While this would work well for subjects past 2ft it won't help your macro at all. Since I'm new to the UW world I'm not sure how this will translate into success or failure but here's some of the things my wife and I discovered toying around with settings and light. The following is all done with the camera at F8 with a shutterspeed of 1/500, RAW format, Manual Mode

1. Depressing the shutter button halfway "woke" the display up briefly in low light conditions (indoors, no lights on, window blinds closed) good enough to see the subject and take a picture. This gives you about a 1.5 seconds snapshot of what you're seeing. The action can be repeated as often as you like but the subsequent windows are shorter (1 second) because the camera doesn't have to focus. BTW...the darkened display condition is present even at F2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/100 in low light conditions. As you increase either the aperture or shutter speed it slowly dims to blackout.

2. darker conditions - subject visible by ambient light to the eye but the camera LCD is black. We simulated this with some "black out" window blinds we purchased several years ago. Since I don't have a light meter, my description will have to do. By turning on the AF illuminator (above water) the camera does an adequate job of lighting up the subject beyond 2ft and taking a picture. Personally, I'm not sure how well this illuminator will work below the surface.

In summary, its hard to quantify this exactly without a light meter; however, I would think that this will work fine for the type of recreational diving I do. Long live 40 for 40! Night dives, and/or dives with vis under 40ft would probably require some sort of permanent light (light cannon?) to be used in place of one, or both of your strobes. I'm not sure how practical that is. In most low-light conditions the camera should be able to give enough of a look (1 second snapshot) at your subject to capture the moment even in macro mode. Is it enough? I'm not experienced enough to say one way or the other but toying with this problem at your local dealer should help you decide. Had I known this before I purchased this camera I probably would have went with another choice. My plans are to call Olympus on Monday to see what my options are. I'm wondering if the SP-500 suffers the same fate.

Just a wierd item of note...the LCD only lightens and darkens dramatically in the manual mode. Every other mode S, A, Auto etc the LDC has mild fluctuations based on available light but nothing as dramatic as manual mode. Furthermore, the duplicate settings in auto and manual reveal drastically different LCD pictures. One other item of note, when you depress the shutter button halfway in any other mode the LCD holds the brightness until you either snap a picture or let go of the button. The manual mode is the only mode where the LCD only brightens momentarily and then darkens again. The only way to momentarily brighten the display (ie see what you're actually taking a picture of) is to let go of the button and press it again. Something leads me to believe its just a setting in manual mode but nothing I can find in playing with it or reading the manual is helping me.

Thanks for the reply. Its further confirmation of a problem with this camera.

For most macro shots I tend to light the subject by extenal strobes. In most cases I go for a small aperture and a relativly fast shutter speed. Under these cases available light is excluded and all the light is provided by the strobes. I have got a lot of nice shots this way on a Canon camera in manual mode.

The Oly SP350 would be useless to me for this type of photography because of the way the LCD goes black on you. I can't really get by with the second or so the screen brightens as you depress the shutter. Other cameras do not behave like this. I checked the SP310 and this behaves just the same.

I am sure it is a design mistake which ruins it for the photographer wanting to use manual settings combined with a seperate flash

A shame - a nice little camera but ruined by this irritating feature.

check the title of the thread just below this one on this same dubious feature with the C8080. Out of all the literature I read, neither camera mentions this "feature". This is simply a case of over engineering. Since this is my first adventure, I'll probably live with this condition instead of trying to send it back. Most all of my dives are in the Carribean so it shouldn't be too much of a hinderance there. BTW...born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire! Cheers.

I have an idea. It's not perfect, but it might be a possible work around.

If this only happens in manual mode, put the camera in aperture priority mode, and dial in as low exposure compensation as you can, probably -3.

That way you can set your strobe power to match the aperture, and with ambient at -3 it should overpower any ambient light in the scene.

Although, I guess if it were really dark, you might night get fast enough shutterspeeds this way.

Any thoughts?

Did this in my house and the exposure compensation only goes to -2. Also, the shutter speed doesn't change off of 1/30.

"If you go into mode menu, select camera, scroll down to histogram (last item) and select "+-On" the LCD will display at low ligh (no histogram) and you should see at all light levels."

This solves the issue. Its amazing you can't find that anywhere in the literature but it completely solved the issue of a darkening screen. The original poster on the "I can't see my screen" thread which is related to this issue. Anyway, big thanks to Alseem for providing a solution.

I'll have to get back to my nearest dealer to check this out! Have I had an ill-informed rant on wetpixel about this LCD blackout problem? Also, can the staff at Olympus UK technical support really be that clueless?

"Have I had an ill-informed rant on wetpixel about this LCD blackout problem?"

I wouldn't worry too much about that. I read through the entire manual and the advanced manual...again trying to find a reference to the LCD going dark. I even went back to several review sites to no avail. It shouldn't have been that hard to find. If not for this site, I'm not sure I would have ever stumbled on it.

It looks as though the LCD is OK after all. Excellent help on this topic - thanks.

The 10 sec or so to write a RAW file is still not great but I was slightly wrong about the 4secs to write a SHQ jpeg. It appears to be possible to take a limited number of succesive SHQ jpegs untill what appears to be a buffer fills up. Not as bad as I first thought but I was hoping for something a bit faster on this latest model.

Can anyone comment on how long the 2xAA batteries will last on a dive?

I have not seen the PT-030 case yet. Any thoughts on the design and build quality of the PT-030 case?

I don't know about AA's but the CR-V3 lithium battery has already burned and downloaded 3, 512MB cards ... each card was about half RAW format and the other half Jpeg. Those are expensive batteries but if you're going on a nice dive I'd certainly equip the camera with them.