Olympus XZ-1 Summary

The Olympus XZ-1 is an excellent compact camera with an advanced feature set and mostly efficient controls to access them. Just about every feature is covered and expansion options are unmatched. The ultra-bright lens is the headline specification, giving it access to lower-ISO than most its peers under the same conditions.

Image quality is very good with no discernable noise until ISO 400. The iZuiko lens is incredible sharp and barely needs to be stopped down to acheive its optimal performance. Metering, white-balance and focus are quite reliable. Colors are not quite perfect but sufficiently resemble reality. Performance is average to good, depending on what is measured. Shutter-lag is slow compared to top cameras but shot-to-shot speeds are very good. Focus is on the only slow aspect.

The XZ-1 provides plenty more controls than most of its peers. There are certainly some quirks but overall it handles well. The display is unfortunately not exposure-priority and its live-histogram is of limited use. The camera also lacks a video mode, making setting up video-framing impossible. This seems like a recurring theme lately and it is certainly not the only camera to experience these issues.

Neocamera detailed review Read the full Olympus XZ-1 review.