Olympus SZ-14 Review

Travel zoom digital cameras are a bridge between point-and-shoots and mega-zoom cameras. They are small enough to easily fit into the pocket and offer a raft of features that allow users to capture great shots. These include a telephoto lens, fully manual controls, plenty of scene presets and filters, and HD video recording. Olympus has chosen a different path with its latest travel zoom camera, the SZ-14. Let’s find out what it has to offer and how it compares with its counterparts on various fronts.

A basic point-and-shoot with a telephoto lens

Design and Features

This 14 megapixel shooter is one of the most elegant looking travel zoom cameras in the market. It’s available in three colours, all sober – silver, red and black. The front of the camera’s shell is reinforced by an aluminium plate with brushed finish. The telescopic lens housing is black with chrome trimming around the rims.

The rear of the camera is a large black plastic panel, which is dominated by a 3-inch LCD monitor. To its right is the control panel that comprises a dedicated video recording button right at the top followed by buttons for playback and menu, a 5-way D-pad with a jog dial and a help button. A rubber grip for the thumb is placed at the top right corner. Lift the plastic flap on the right side and you’ll find an HDMI (type D) and a USB port. The battery and the SD card reside in a common compartment that can be accessed by unlocking and opening a plastic flap on the base.

Starting with the key features, the lens is quite wide at 25 mm. This favours capturing full body portraits and large groups without moving too much away. It also helps capturing wide landscapes and panoramas without taking too many shots. The lens extends up to 600 mm, which translates to a good 24x optical zoom. The largest apertures at wide and telephoto ends are F3.0 and F6.9 respectively. While an aperture of F3.0 is fairly decent for a budget travel zoom, F6.9 will result in underexposure in low light, leaving you with no option but to boost the ISO or use a tripod. Closely observe the top and the control panel – found something missing? Most travel zoom cameras have a mode dial that lets you select Auto, PASM, scene presets and effect filters. The mode dial is missing here. Which brings us to the user interface – it’s typical of all Olympus digital cameras. The shooting parameters are displayed in a stack to the right and the parameters that can be tweaked depend on the shooting mode you select. The most advanced shooting mode available is Program in which you can set the white balance, ISO (80 to 1600), burst mode, AF mode (Face, Spot and AF tracking), among a few more parameters. You don’t get manual and semi-manual modes, which makes the SZ-14 a basic point-and-shoot camera but with a telephoto lens. The other shooting modes include the following: iAUTO: Automatically detects the type of scene and accordingly uses optimal exposure parameters. All you can do here is set the image resolution, enable/disable flash and use the self-timer. SCN: A total of 16 scene presets including face detection for pets (cats and dogs), Fireworks, Sport, Sunset, Indoor, Night portrait, Documents and Cusisine. MAGIC: A collection of 11 effect filters to get creative shots without having to post-process. These include Pop Art (punchy colours), Pin Hole, Fish Eye, Soft Focus, Watercolor, Miniature and Reflection. Here, you can set the image resolution, use Macro, enable/disable flash and use the self timer. Panorama: This mode allows shooting 180 degree panoramas using three techniques. In the auto mode, you simply have to pan the camera and the panorama image is stitched on-the-fly. The sad part is that the panoramas are 2 megapixels in size. In Manual mode, you get to shoot three images and the guide for the next image appears as an overlay of the edge of the previous image. The PC mode allows you to take as many shots so that you can manually stitch them using a panorama stitching app on your PC.  3D: This mode takes left and right eye shots and combines them to make a 3D image. However, these images can’t be viewed on the camera.