White balance and colour
I am impressed by the performance of the automatic white balance system of the Olympus E-620. Notably, it copes very well with mixed lighting conditions, which cannot be said of all current DSLRs. In a museum, lit partly by sodium lights and partly by sunlight, the E-620 consistently delivered pleasing results, with only a few images needing minor adjustments to remove the suggestion of a pink colour cast.
In daylight, the AWB system performs slightly differently from what I would expect, but not in a bad way: although it removes a little warmth from images taken in low-contrast conditions, it actually adds a little into pictures taken in bright sunlight, producing images that are warmer than those taken using the daylight WB preset.
Viewed in isolation, equivalent images taken at the two different WB settings look fine, but viewed side-by-side I prefer the warmer colour rendition of daylight pictures taken using AWB. The only environment in which I found the E-620’s AWB system consistently struggled was, again, back in the museum under low-intensity 100% sodium lighting, where the camera did what I expected and gave a yellowy-green cast.
The Olympus E-620 features a small collection of Picture Mode presets for its JPEG files: Vivid, Natural, Muted, Portrait, Monotone and Custom. Although this is a smaller range than can be found on some competitive DSLRs, it is more than adequate for normal photography, and all colour presets can be customised to the extent that the contrast, sharpness and saturation can be adjusted on a ±2 step scale (with 0 as the default in all cases). The Monotone picture mode is fairly
versatile, and black & white filter effects can be added as well as a range of toning options including sepia and ‘blue’ for a cyanotype effect.
