GE Power X500 boasts an apparently excellent combination of kit for a very good price indeed. A 15x optical zoom lens and 16MP resolution for a price which at well under most cumsumer compacts, looks too good to be true.
The lens - which covers a focal range of 27mm to 405mm in conventional 35mm equivalent terms - is okay but the general performance is very sluggish indeed. From the slow focusing and poor metering reliability to the one-second shutter lag and almost four and half seconds between snaps almost every element of usage performs with a lag.
Image quality is fine for general snaps in good lighting but noise and lack of detail mar anything in low light without flash or at ISO setting higher than the second-lowest setting of ISO 200. These include 20 scene modes, manual shooting options and a good range of automated features such as face detection AF, blink and smile detection and automatic scene-recognition modes.
The design and build are nice too, even if the overall performance leaves a lot to be desired. And so if you are on a very tight budget with very little room for over-spending and yet need that long zoom focal range then there is nothing elese on the market at this price, to match.
