There’s a particular pleasure when shooting with a massively powerful telephoto lens, whether you’re pointing it at wildlife in the trees or the wild life your buddies are experiencing down the beach. That’s what drew us to the Olympus SP-570UZ, with its extraordinary 20x zoom capability. It isn’t a flawless performer: image quality is only average, and zooming the lens in and out could be a whole lot smoother. On the other hand, the 10-megapixel SP-570UZ packs a lot of power into a compact body that feels great in your hands, the manual exposure controls are extensive, and we feel the $450 price is justified.

To start with the headline feature, the optical zoom ranges from 4.6mm–92mm, equivalent to a 28mm-520mm zoom on a 35mm camera. The telephoto end of the range is clearly important, but we were also pleased with the 28mm wide angle part of the equation, since it lets you take panoramic shots and fit your friends into the frame when shooting in close quarters. The lens offers a nice fast aperture when shooting in low light (f/2.8 at its widest setting, f/4.5 at maximum telephoto), which combined with an effective anti-shake stabilization system makes long-range handheld shooting surprisingly practical.

The 570UZ body looks and feels like an ultra-compact SLR, which works out very well. The camera weighs only about a pound, with a grip that’s nicely sculpted and rubberized for a firm handhold. The flash is another strong point: it pops up high enough over the camera body to avoid red-eye when photographing people in low-light environments, and pumps out bright, even illumination. And while the screen is a pedestrian 2.7-inch size, it does a better job in bright light than most LCD displays, using a technology that reflects some of the light back through the image to amp up the brightness instead of simply washing out.

The biggest problem with the camera hardware is the lens control, whether for zooming or manual focus. It looks like an SLR lens, but instead of directly controlling the zoom or focus when you turn the lens barrel, you activate a motor which tends to be herky-jerky and imprecise. It’s not a deal breaker, but it is an ongoing annoyance.

Performance (read in-depth lab performance at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
For the most part, the SP-570UZ delivered mediocre image test results; image noise was very low, and sharpness was exceptional right in the middle of the zoom range but softened considerably as we moved toward either wide-angle or telephoto extremes. For the rest of our testing, including color accuracy, white balance, dynamic range and low-light performance, the camera tended to score a hair behind other ultra-zoom models we’ve tested, but not enough to be problematic.

If you like shooting video clips with your still camera, though, be warned: the video shot with the 570UZ looks pretty awful.  As for shooting a burst of continuous images, there’s good news and bad news. At full 10-megapixel resolution, the camera chugged along at an unexciting single frame per second, then choked after four shots to record the results to the memory card. However, if you throttle down the resolution  to 5 megapixels, the 570UZ can fire off over seven shots a second, fast enough to effectively capture sports and other active subjects, at a resolution still high enough to produce decent-sized prints.

Comparisons (read in-depth lab comparisons at DigitalCameraInfo.com)
We considered the pros and cons of the Olympus SP-570UZ against four other ultra-zoom cameras we’ve reviewed, including the Canon PowerShot SX110 IS, the Casio EX-FH20, the earlier (and still available) Olympus SP-560UZ and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.
The Canon is far less expensive, at $250 versus $450 for the Olympus, but the zoom lens is limited to 10x rather than 20x magnification. Still, 10x is a substantial zoom at a significantly lower price, and while the Canon body design is nowhere near as sleek as the Olympus, the controls and image quality results are in the same ballpark.

The Casio, with its 20x zoom lens, is pricier than the Olympus, at $600, but there’s a reason. The EX-FH20 is a speed demon, able to fire off 40 photos in a second at 7-megapixel resolution. Image quality isn’t great, but for sports and other fast-action applications, it’s a camera worth considering.

The Olympus SP-560UZ costs just $50 less than the newer 570UZ. Given the higher resolution, slightly longer zoom (18x versus 20x) and, most importantly, superior lab testing results, we’d advise spending the extra cash and going with the 570UZ.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 is the camera we’d weigh most seriously against the Olympus. Priced at $350 with 8-megapixel resolution and an 18x zoom lens, the FZ18 is well built, handles nicely  and scored better when it comes to color accuracy than the Olympus. However, the Olympus delivered photos with lower image noise, and feels more comfortable while shooting.