The Olympus EVOLT E-330 offers something a lot of people have been hoping for. Taking advantage of how far the price of image sensors has fallen, the E-330 features not one, but two sensors. The first is an NMOS sensor with a resolution of 7.5 megapixels, which is used for image capture. The second sensor is a CCD of unknown resolution, which is used to allow a live preview image on the camera’s LCD display. A couple of digital SLRs have offered live previews in the past, but these have come with strong limitations as to how long (and how) they could be used, making them essentially unuseable in the manner that most point-and-shoot digicam owners have become accustomed to. The E-330 solves this, and so the company has focused on optimising the LCD shooting experience, with a larger than average 2.5″ LCD display mounted on a tilting mechanism for easy viewing from a range of angles.The E-330 also offers a range of other features shared with past Evolt models, including CompactFlash and xD-Picture card storage, dust reduction system, and more.

The Olympus E330 offers a resolution of 7.5 million pixels. Although this is slightly less than that of its predecessor, it certainly isn’t significant. However, these types of resolutions do require quite a share of storage capacity. This doesn’t limit itself to memory cards; larger hard disks would also prove handy. I would recommend a memory card with a minimum of 1GB for photographing. A RAW file already proves 12.9MB in size, whilst a TIFF is an astounding 21.6MB. This should make it clear why it’s wiser to capture your images in RAW than in TIFF, especially when you want to achieve the maximum quality. JPEG offers the choice between several resolutions, each featuring four compression modes. The minimum compression is 1/2.7, which translates to a 5.7MB file when working with the maximum resolution. This is still quite a reasonable file, which easily suffices to produce large prints. The following table shows the amount of images that fit onto a 1GB card. The Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 Zuiko Digital Lens captures extremely sharp and detailed images and can be purchased as a kit with the Olympus E-330.