It's worth comparing it directly to its sibling, the Olympus Li-70B Battery. The biggest difference between the two is resolution -- the SZ-14 tops out at 14 megapixels but this extends to 16 megapixels on the SP-620UZ, albeit on the same size sensor.
So why would you buy the Olympus fe-4020 battery? Apart from the higher resolution, which will tempt those of you who shop on headline figures alone, the primary benefit is the brightness of the lens. While the SZ-14 is fractionally brighter at wide angle, with a maximum aperture of f/3.0, compared to the SP-620UZ's f/3.1, it's stepped down by more than one stop at full telephoto, stretching to just f/6.9 compared to the SP-620UZ's f/5.8.
Comparing these figures directly is a little unfair as we'd expect the SZ-14 to be a little darker on account of its longer zoom. But it's still a significant margin. That could well be enough to recommend the Sony Np-fs11 Battery to those who are willing to use the extra two megapixels to crop their shots, thus compensating for the shorter zoom, while benefiting from brighter results and shorter exposures at lower sensitivities.
Despite their differences in size, with the SP-620UZ close to twice the depth and more than double the weight of the SZ-14, the latter actually has the longer zoom, stretching to 24x, or 600mm in a regular 35mm camera.
I started my tests with the Sony np-bd1 camera battery macro performance. When set to super-macro, this gets you to within 1cm of your subject. With the camera set to iAuto throughout my tests, I let it self-select the regular macro setting, which gets you to 20cm in wide angle and 1.8m at full telephoto.
The results were very good, with a sharp sweet spot at the focal point and a pleasing fall-off in either direction from there. There's plenty of detail in this image of shells on a shore, with well handled reflections and clear differentiation between them, even where shells of very similar colours rest up against each other.
The Olympus camera battery mode gets you to within 20cm of your subject in regular use, and a more impressive 1cm in super-macro (click image to enlarge).
When shooting at more conventional distances, the Olympus Li-50B Battery kept up the high performance. This deserted funfair has plenty of bright colors and surface textures, each of which the camera took in its stride. However, while the colors are true to the originals, when you zoom to 100 per cent, there is a distinct dappling evident on some of the sharp contrasts. This can be seen at the point where the railing on the side of the ride passed in front of the helicopter, and where the red backplate meets the back of the seat.
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