We do noise tests on the new Olympus DSLR and provide RAW image files for you to download to examine yourself
The Olympus E-330 is a great camera. The live preview is an excellent feature for many applications and the addition of the tilting LCD is a great help in many situations, such as macro.
To assess the noise of the E-330 we took shots under a range of circumstances. On the special camera section of this site you will find RAW files for all of these images, so if you have the appropriate software you can download the files and examine them yourself.
All the images are unsharpened, unenhanced RAW images. The images here are minimally compressed JPEGs of a tiny section from the center of the image that show no visible JPEG artifacts in comparison with the original RAW.
Daytime shots:
100ISO
200ISO
400ISO
800ISO
1600ISO
You can see that noise is very well controlled with this camera, even at 1600ISO.
For the following nighttime shots the exposure time was kept to 8 seconds in all cases, with the aperture varying from shot to shot to provide the same exposure level.
Nighttime shots with Noise Reduction on:
100ISO
200ISO
400ISO
800ISO
1600ISO
Nighttime shots with Noise Reduction off:
100ISO
200ISO
400ISO
800ISO
1600ISO
You can see that the noise reduction mode on the E-330 camera does a good job of removing noise and hot pixels without degrading image detail much at all.
This is a great camera for low-light level work.