The pro-level E-1 SLR was the first Four Thirds camera from any manufacturer, and good though it is, its 5-megapixel resolution was always going to be a perceived drawback.

The E-300 followed, with an 8-megapixel sensor and a decent entry-level price point. Despite a tastier CCD, the oddball design and slightly plastic construction didn't win a great deal of fans.

Olympus has obviously been listening to our gripes, with the E-500 looking like the camera the E-300 should have been all along. With more of a resemblance to the E-1 and a 'proper' digital SLR design, it also comes packed with clever photographic features.

Real photography

The camera's RAW mode takes large files at 13-14Mb and takes a lengthy 12 seconds after you've taken a RAW photo before the camera is ready to shoot again. This is just too long if you need to take quality, fleeting shots.

This is a camera where you're going to have to rely on 'right-first-time' shooting in JPEG mode to get the best results, and there's loads of features to help you do this.

There are many parameters for adjusting the image tone, and it makes as much sense to sort these out when you take the shot, as it does to shoot RAW and then toil endlessly over the parameters back on your computer. The E-500 is about getting your hands dirty.

Let's start with the exposure system. You get the Olympus 49-point Digital ESP metering mode for point-and-shoot photography, Centre-weighted metering and a Spot metering mode. But the Spot mode has two extra variants - 'HI' and 'SH'. In the HI mode, the camera pegs the metered area as a brilliant white highlight, while in the SH mode it sets it to come out as a dense black.

In effect, you choose an area which you want to reproduce as a brilliant white or dense black, set the relevant Spot mode, position the spot metering point over that area then lock the exposure, reframe and shoot.

If you want to retain some shadow or highlight detail in these areas, you'll need to apply a degree of exposure compensation first. For example, to just retain detail in a bright sky, you might set the EV compensation to -0.3EV or -0.7EV before using the HI mode and taking a spot reading from the sky.

It's about time makers started producing smarter metering systems as opposed to making them merely more complex. You know what else we'd like? A multi-pattern variant that averaged the darkest and brightest points in the scene to arrive at the exposure. This is another classic metering technique and would be most welcome. Maybe they'll get round to this next time...

You can also adjust the 'Gradation' of images to produce high-key shots where the tones are stacked up towards the highlight end of the scale, or low-key images where they're stacked towards the shadows.

On top of this, there are Vivid, Natural, Muted, Monotone and Sepia colour modes. In the Monotone mode you can apply red, green, yellow and orange 'contrast' filters, just like you could with black and white film.

In the three colour modes, you can also modify the contrast, sharpness and saturation values, which can be slightly confusing. You'd expect the Vivid mode, for example, to simply have increased saturation and contrast than the others, however, the menus indicate starting values of zero for all three parameters in each mode, suggesting that there is a lot more to it than that.

The slightly sluggish RAW performance and the abundance of in-camera tone and colour controls will probably encourage you to shoot JPEGs and to try to get everything right at the time of shooting. That's actually not a bad thing, because it shifts the emphasis towards real photography and away from endless fiddling around with image-editing software on the computer. About time too.

Everyday handling

The E-500's startup time of around two seconds is slightly longer than that of other D-SLRs because it's applying its Supersonic Wave Filter momentarily in order to shake off any dust on the sensor.

The viewfinder is bright and clear, but it's also quite small - presumably because of the smaller Four Thirds sensor/mirror/pentaprism assembly. On the back of the camera, the 2.5-inch LCD display also contains all the shooting/status information. There's no separate LCD for this data and the E-500 is like Konica Minolta's Dynax 5D in this respect.

The menus are clear and well-designed, though it can take a few moments to navigate through them to the options you want. The camera's been designed to avoid this as far as possible, though, with a set of 'Direct Function' buttons on the body itself, to make rapid changes.