Olympus mju 1030SW
Personal Review
The Olympus mju 1030SW claims to be a tough little camera: waterproof, shockproof and freezeproof
Pros:
- Totally waterproof, even down to 10m. In fact the recommended treatment
to keep the camera clean is to immerse it in fresh water for 10 minutes.
Fantastic for snorkeling and shallow diving (which is where most of the sea
life lives anyway).
- Shockproof so clumsy people can drop it onto concrete from 2m.
Fantastic for other sports like caving.
- Freezeproof, hmmm, I guess this is a side-effect of being waterproof
because if there is no moisture inside the body then it can't freeze. A lot
of cameras will work in cold temperatures anyway if the air is dry (battery
power excepted, the 1030 being no different here).
- Manonmeter (pressure) readings at all times plus converted to equivalent
height above, or depth below, sea level, plus the ability to calibrate zero.
The values are stored inside the image file (in the EXIF MakerNotes).
- It has in-camera help text: if you forget what a particular mode is for
just press the Disp button and a descriptive sentence is displayed.
- Micro-SD cards can be used instead of the stupid Olympus-proprietary xD
cards, thankfully since the SD cards are half the price. The slot is still
xD but a small internal adapter is supplied.
- The battery warning light gives you plenty of time to take more
photos before it runs out, unlike Canon compacts which only seem to
warn when the battery is almost empty.
Cons:
- The printed manual is very basic but even the full manual supplied as a
PDF on the CD is still skimpy on the exact details of all the modes. Most
of the Scene modes are simply not described at all, even in the Advanced
Manual.
And the in-camera help text is also sometimes totally stupid, for example
in Underwater Mode it says "For taking pictures underwater" which of course
you have already guessed and so are none the wiser.
- No orientation sensor so all photos need to be rotated manually,
very tedious compared to Canon cameras.
- Very slow, certainly slower than Canon compacts.
- Not sure how effective or speedy the focus system is...
- The underwater modes make no attempt to compensate for colour changes,
which is a missed opportunity given that the camera knows the depth and thus
the spectral attenuation.
- The black (or green) colour is a thin layer of paint which quickly
comes off. The 'scratchproof' metal also scratches.
- Movies are limited to 10 seconds! And they are only 640x480 max.
Maybe longer ones can be stored on xD cards and this is a deliberate ploy
to sell more xD cards.
- Writing to the memory card is slow, probably because either the camera
is slow or it is going via the stupid xD interface.
- The panorama function is not available when using SD cards. I'm willing
to bet this is a deliberate ploy to sell xD cards. The manual doesn't explain
this function anyway but I'm sure I'm not missing anything that can't be done
with the free AutoStitch program anyway.
- The computer cable looks like mini-USB but I'm sure is incompatible, d'oh!
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