SP-500 UZ help....

[ndfan19]

I am fairly new to using a digital and for the most part I love my camera. I just have several questions on things that I need to do.

1. In the automatic/scene mode; the camera takes terrible pictures indoors when you are unable to use a flash. Everything comes up fuzzy. I think I found how to manually find the area to make the change but I have no idea of what to set the camera.

2. I really would like to automatically have the camera set to SHQ for the 3:2 ratio since everytime I get my photos developed I need to manually go in and make sure that I am not cutting off anyone's head. The girl at the photo developing place told me to make sure that I set it for 3:2. What is the difference of HQ & SHQ? I found how to change it but it is only for this particular session. When I turn my camera off, it goes back to the default.

Any suggestions on how in the world I can learn what all these setting mean????

I appreciate any help in having this make sense to me.

[Photo-John]

Welcome to PhotographyREVIEW.com!

I'm going to answer your second question first. I believe all Olympus digital cameras - at least the ones I've used - have a mode that you can program yourself or that saves your settings. I can't remember which. In any case, if you check the manual it will give the details. Then you can set your camera for SHQ and it will stay that way. SHQ stands for "super high quality." It means the camera will use less compression when it saves JPEGs. Your image quality will be as good as it can possibly be (for JPEG format). The tradeoff is that your files will be larger and you'll be able to shoot less images on your memory card. I think you should always use the highest quality your camera offers. More memory is cheaper than a photo that you can't use exactly the way you want to.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the problem with the first question. It sounds like your camera has unable to focus so your photos are soft. Is that correct? Maybe you can post a sample photo so we can see the problem for ourselves. I don't know exactly how it works with your camera. But some cameras have a "focus assist" that helps the camera focus in low light. Sometimes they have a small light that projects on the subject so the auto focus system can focus. It's possible your camera uses the light on the flash or the flash needs to be open for it to work. See if you can find something about "focus assist" in your camera manual. And play with it to see if it projects a white or red light to focus on in low light. From your description, that's my best guess about why your photos would be soft.

Hope that helps. Please post a review for your camera in our review section. The foundation of PhotographyREVIEW.com is user reviews. We need reviews for all types of cameras, from all types of photographers.

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