This first shot was taken under bright Sunlight at the E-520’s lowest sensitivity, so represents ideal conditions. The 14-42mm was zoomed-out to its widest angle – and equivalent of 28mm. The crops contain lots of detail and there’s no coloured fringing on the yacht’s high-contrast deck to complain about. The default image processing settings are natural-looking, although fans of punchier images may prefer to boost the sharpening a notch.

Landscape: 4.45MB, Program, 1/200, f8, ISO 100, 14-42mm at 42mm (equivalent to 84mm)

						Our second shot was again taken at the lowest 100 ISO sensitivity under bright conditions, although this time with the kit lens zoomed-into its longest equivalent of 84mm. Again there’s lots of detail in the crops, although again a slight softness which some may prefer to sharpen a little. The bright hull of the boat has saturated the highlights and any detail there has become irretrievable, but to be fair the same would happen with most other DSLRs using similar exposures.

Landscape: 4.24MB, Program, 1/400, f11, ISO 200, 14-42mm at 39mm (equivalent to 78mm)

The bright white hull dominates the frame and in bright conditions has caused the E-520 to underexpose a little, although at least there’s no blown highlights.

The increase in sensitivity also hasn’t had a detrimental impact on image quality.

Face Detection easily locked-onto the subject and has resulted in a sharp image with detailed crops.

The kit lens isn’t able to achieve a very small depth of field even zoomed-in and with its widest aperture, but we did manage to blur the background a little.

The subject matter here can often be quite forgiving on higher sensitivities, but even so, the results here are very respectable.

Again like the others so far, sharp, detailed and without any noise to worry about.

Some cameras underexpose this image, but the E-520 has coped well with the conditions.

The crops are a little less crisp then those at 100 and 200 ISO, but there’s no noise artefacts to complain about. A very usable result at 400 ISO.

This coupled with the dim conditions resulted in a slow shutter speed of 1/6, which would be a challenge to handhold even with the lens zoomed-out. The E-520’s built-in Image Stabilisation has however ensured any wobbles have been ironed-out.

There’s a fall in quality at 800 ISO, but it’s still a very usable result.

This kind of composition can also benefit from the E-520’s Shadow Adjustment Technology, SAT. See a before and after comparison on our Features page.

Overall the E-520 performs well across its ISO range, and its images can easily handle a little extra sharpening at lower sensitivities if desired.