The Olympus E-620 delivers all the key features of the company’s more upscale E-30, but in a more compact body and at nearly half the price ($699.99 for the body alone, $799.99 with a 14-42mm lens). The two cameras provide 12-megapixel resolution and a 2.7-inch LCD that pivots and swivels for shooting at unusual angles. The screen is much easier to view in bright light than most SLR screens (a key benefit when shooting in Live View mode, where you compose your photo on the LCD screen). Unfortunately, the two cameras also shared a few image-quality weaknesses in our lab testing,  most importantly an overabundance of image noise, the speckly visual static that’s most noticeable in solid-color areas and in photos taken under less-than-ideal lighting conditions.

The E-620 is a relatively petite SLR, measuring 5.11 x 3.70 x 2.36 inches (130mm x 94mm x 60mm) and weighing in at 16.76 ounces (475g) for the body alone, without lens or battery. That’s a big plus for portabilty, and a boon for folks with small hands who’d rather not grapple with a larger camera. Those of us with more massive mitts may find the E-620 a bit small for easy handling, though, particularly due to the short, thin grip on the righthand side. Still, this is no flyweight toy camera. The E-620 has a nice heft in your hands, and feels solidly built.

The buttons and dials are clearly labeled and easy to adjust, for the most part, and several key controls are even backlit, a highly unusual and very welcome feature when trying to shoot in darkened settings. As for the menu system, Olympus has adopted the now common practice of using the rear LCD screen to provide quick-access to the most frequently used camera settings. They call it the Super Control Panel, and we’re inclined to share their enthusiasm – the system is easy to read and maneuver, and puts nearly everything that’s likely to need changing in one convenient spot. As for the less common controls, the standard menu system is unattractive but not unwieldy.

One of the more unusual features of the Olympus E-620, also shared with the earlier E-30, is a set of digital Art Filters that provide dramatic special effects with no special skill on your part.  The six filters include Pop Art (hyper-intense colors), Soft Focus, Pale & Light Color, Light Tone, Grainy Film (black and white) and Pin Hole, which looks like the photo was taken with a pinhole camera. There is no way to adjust the intensity of these effects, which we found odd. And we were also concerned at first that these special effects are employed while you’re shooting the original image, rather than on a copy of the original afterwards. Happily there’s a workaround for the latter problem; by shooting in JPEG plus RAW mode you get a JPEG version of the picture with the filter effect in place and a RAW version without any effects applied. As seasoned image editing software users, we scoffed at these effects at first, but truth be told, we become intrigued by the Pop Art, Grainy Film and Pin Hole filters over time.

Performance (read in-depth lab performance coverage at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
The good news in our image quality testing came in unusually accuate color reproduction, along with respectable resolution results. Even using the inexpensive kit lens provided, sharpness was good and distortion was low. The problem areas are related to image noise, and they are significant. Even in a brightly lit studio, the grainy imperfection of image noise is clearly visible at all but the lowest ISO settings. Ramping up the noise reduction filtering system to its highest levels tames the problem to some degree, but causes a noticeable loss of detail. The related problem is dynamic range, the ability to reproduce detail clearly in a high-contrast setting, where there are both very bright and very dark areas in the same photo. In our testing, the E-620 starting out with disappointing results even at the most forgiving, low ISO levels, and went from bad to worse as we cranked up the ISO setting.

Comparisons (read in-depth comparisons at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
We conducted head-to-head comparisons of the E-620 against four other cameras, including its big brother, the Olympus E-30, the pricier Nikon D90 and the slightly less expensive Canon Rebel XS and Pentax K2000.

The Olympus E-30 sells for $1300 without a lens, versus $700 for the Olympus E-620 body. What accounts for the hefty price difference? The E-30 is more ruggedly built, with superior weather resistance and structural integrity. It also has a slightly faster burst rate for continous shooting, a higher-capacity battery and a more effective autofocus system. For many users, though, the fact that the two share a sensor and the slick articulated LCD screen will make the more portable E-620 a more appealing choice.

The Nikon D90 is best known as the first SLR to include video recording capability, but we like this model for its solid across-the-board still image performance, along with the beautiful 920,000-dot color LCD (versus a more ordinary 230,000-dot resolution for the E-620). The Nikon is free of the image noise problems that plague both Olympus models, and while it is larger in size and higher in price ($999 for the body alone), it is undeniably a superior camera.

The Canon Rebel XS is another compact SLR, priced $200 lower than the Olympus (at $599.99 with lens). In most respects, the E-620 delivers substantial benefits for the extra cash, including a better-built body, higher resolution, a faster burst rate and wider ISO range for low-light shooting. However, when it comes to image quality, the less expensive camera came out on top in most of our tests. The Olympus has a slight advantage in color accuracy and resolution, but the Canon delivered lower image noise and higher dynamic range, and was able to handle varied lighting conditions more accurately.

Finally, the Pentax K2000 is a value-priced $600 package including the camera, lens and an external flash that’s list priced at $149. The E-620 offers a higher resolution (12 megapixels versus 10 for the K2000), an LCD with a pivoting hinge, Live View (which the K2000 lacks) and more ways to customize the camera to fit your personal preferences. We give Pentax credit, though, for building a very solid little camera for the money. And when it comes to lab-tested image quality, the Olympus proved superior in color accuracy, but the Pentax scored significantly better in dynamic range, white balance and image noise, and nearly equal in resolution.