Excellent camera--I also upgraded from an E-500

Just as it was with the E-500, once you play around with the settings to get them how you like them, this camera will produce great pictures in the "Olympus" style, although I think the pictures I'm getting look like Olympus may be moving in the direction of a more "Cannon-like" effect—a good or bad thing, depending on your preferences. Maybe konoimo's opinion would have been different had he kept his 510 for more than a day and spent some time cruising the better Olympus forums for 510 tips. The default settings for the E-510 seem to produce noticeably different photos than the E-500 defaults, but you can get pretty close to the same place with just a bit of tweaking. For example, konoimo complained about pics being too sharp, but he also said the noise reduction is better off or set to low. If you do set it to low or off, then you need to reduce the sharpening, which by default is set a bit higher to offset the default noise reduction setting. Likewise, the default color saturation seems to be a bit lower than the E-500 (and many complained that the E-500 was set too vivid). You can tweak the color settings to get the same "pop out at you" effect that the default E-500 had.

Not sure why konoimo's 510 was underexposing—mine's not—but it might be related to the fact that the default metering is set to ESP + AF, and many (myself included) like the results better with metering set to ESP. Also,it's possible konoimo just got a lemon—it happens :-(

FYI—I have taken about 4000 photos with my E-500 and roughly 500 with my E-510. The IS seems to work well, and I like the live view, though I don't use it for a majority of my photos.