This first shot was taken with the E-620 under bright light at its lowest 100 ISO sensitivity and therefore represents ideal conditions. I used the flip-out screen to comfortably shoot at a high angle, as revealed by my shadow in the lower left corner. The crops are packed with detail and as you’d hope, bereft of noise. While there’s a small amount of fringing in high contrast areas towards the corners, the kit lens remains impressively sharp right up to the edges.

Landscape: 4.63MB, Program, 1/250, f6.3, ISO 100, 14-42mm at 14mm (equivalent to 28mm)

						Another shot under bright light with the lens zoomed-out and at a sensitivity of 100 ISO. This was taken virtually at ground level, where the E-620’s flip-out screen again made composition much easier. As before, the crops are full of detail and the lens is well-corrected into the corners. Any detail in saturated highlight areas, such as the boat in the middle crop, has however been lost.

Landscape: 5.28MB, Program, 1/500, f11, ISO 200, 14-42mm at 42mm (equivalent to 84mm)

The sequence of shots was mostly sharp, although some were a little out.

Again the kit lens has delivered a sharp, detailed image, although the increase to 200 ISO has resulted in faint evidence of noise in darker areas, such as the clothing in the crops.

We initially tried shooting this with face detection in Live View, but while the frame locked-onto the subject straight-away, the contrast-based focusing was too slow to be practical. To be fair, the same applies to all DSLRs with live view and face detection so far.

Here’s an example, taken with the E-620’s sensitivity increased to 400 ISO.

There’s sharp details across the frame and the subject matter has also been forgiving to the boost in sensitivity. The Olympus kit lens really is a good performer for the size and money.

We initially tried shooting this in Live View with face detection, but suffered from several images where the subject was slightly out of focus; as such this was shot with the viewfinder phase-change AF system.

Noise begins to really kick-in at 400 ISO on the E-620, although modest noise reduction means there’s still plenty of detail in the crops.

The stabilisation has kept the image perfectly steady and represents about 2.5 stops of compensation here.

Viewed at 100%, there’s now visibly greater noise than before, and it has to be said, more than seen on its main rivals. On the plus side, minimal NR again means detail can still be retrieved.

Noise levels are now much higher than before, and again higher than those of rival models. High ISO Noise is the Achilles’ Heel of the E-620, but at least NR isn’t smearing away detail.

The E-620 then goes on to offer a 3200 ISO option, and you can see samples of this scene at every sensitivity in our High ISO Noise results page.

Below you can also see three examples of the E-620’s Art Filters in action.