When this camera first launched, I was in my mid-teens and shooting with my dad's hand-me-down 1970s Nikomat. The E-10 is coming up on being as old now as that was then. Time gets you sometimes.

At launch, this beast cost $1950 USD. Adjusted for inflation, that's around the equivalent of $3500 as of mid-2025. I picked mine up for about £11 once you take into account shipping. As such, it's clear that it was aimed at the prosumer and semi-pro end of the market.

Controls and ergonomics – oh boy, they're everywhere. There's hardly anything you need to dive into the menus for. Want to change the white balance? Press the button and use the command dial to select the options. Flash? The same. Change the JPG quality and resolution? The same. All that said, the buttons feel like they're in logical places, and once I've gotten used to them, I think this will be a very nice way to quickly change any settings.

The grip is deep and comfortable, once I removed the soft coating that must have been made of some kind of petrochemical, as it was returning to a tar-like state. It needs to be, though; it's not a light camera, and there's no changing the lens to make it lighter.

Bridge or DSLR? They call it a DSLR, but the lens can't be changed, making it closer in that respect to bridge cameras. The way it differs from most early bridge cameras, however, is that it has an OVF rather than an early, horrible EVF. So, a non-interchangeable lens DSLR, I guess.

Olympus did offer a teleconverter and a wide converter to attach to the front of the lens. I don't have those, but if I ever get hold of one, I'll do a separate write-up.

About that OVF. It's a bit odd. It's round, for one; there's no split to aid with manual focus, and when zoomed in, there's obvious barrel distortion (which doesn't affect the final image). The information displayed at the bottom of the viewfinder is pretty standard.

The lens itself is bright and sharp, with f/2 at the 35mm equivalent wide end and only going down to f/2.4 when zoomed all the way in to 150mm equivalent. It's a big part of the camera's weight; you can tell there's a lot of glass in there.

The usability in 2025 is pretty good. Mine came with (what I believe to be the original) 16MB SmartMedia card. Even in 2001, that must have been a pretty poor offering from Olympus, given you can get about 20 photos on it at the high-quality JPG setting. I've not even tried the TIFF or RAW settings yet. However, it's got dual slots and takes CF cards (max capacity 2GB because they need to be FAT16 formatted). You can use standard AA batteries.