Euclid-lis blog

Posts Tagged ‘olympus’

I bought this for my wife and she really loves it. She doesn’t run without it anymore.
Olympus CAP LENS UW

I bought an Olympus Stylus 850SW because I wanted a durable point-and-shoot to carry in my motorcycle tank bag, so I could illustrate my blogposts from the road.
The shockproof/waterproof feature is what sold me and I am confident that this camera will survive whatever I can throw at it. The 8 megapixel images are plenty big for my purposes.
Keeping in mind that I’m a semi-pro photographer with lots of experience with Nikon SLRs, digital and film, I find a few things aggravating/inconvenient about the 850SW.
The shutter lag, which is common in point-and-shoots, can make you crazy if you’re shooting anything that is moving or might move or change from moment to moment.
The oddball xD memory card, which necessitates a sometimes hard-to-find card reader for transfer to a computer and its limitation to 2GB of memory.
The absence of a see-through viewfinder, making it necessary to compose your photo on the rear screen – very hard to see in direct sunlight.
The proprietary Olympus battery, making it necessary for you to pack the battery charger when you travel.
Like all digital point-and-shoots, you need to take some time to read the manual and learn the structure of the menus and the features they include. Yes, you can pick it up and take a picture, but after that, you’d better start reading the manual if you want to be proficient with this camera.
If I were looking for a digital camera to put in the hands of a child who might drop it, sit on it or step on it, this is the camera I’d pick.
Olympus Stylus 850 SW

I’m surprised and delighted with the sharp, clear photos this camera takes, the panorama feature, and the amount of editing that can be done in-camera – it’s amazing. The instructions and the camera’s menus are quite friendly if you’ve ever used a digital camera before. I’m already using settings that I never could remember how to find in my much less intuitive Sony menu.

However, in using all those settings, I discovered that when Olympus and the 1010’s users tout the camera’s long battery life, they’re talking about point and shoot with the occasional flash or zoom, and not taking full advantage of all the special features the camera has to offer. If, for example, you use the zoom frequently, set your screen brightness to high because you’re shooting in bright sunlight, use the Guide frequently, make a lot of in-camera edits, play back to erase old photos you’ve fixed in camera, etc., a new, fully charged battery drains fast, and without adequate warning. The battery drain I might have expected, and that’s not the real issue for me as I can live with that considering all the great things the camera can do. The biggest problem for me so far is that after shooting approximately 40-50 photos one day, doing all of the above (zoom, lots of edits, playing back, etc.) the battery indicator still showed green and full. The following day, after I had taken maybe 5 shots, the battery suddenly (i.e. no quarter or half `down’ indications) blinked red and showed a quarter charge left. At no time when I turned the camera on did the battery indicator show anything but green and a full charge. After anywhere from one shot taken to 2-3 seconds after turn-on, the indicator showed almost empty, and eventually empty battery. I had made a trip to a local museum specifically to try the camera out, and left after taking less than half the shots I wanted to try because the battery, which had read fully charged the night before, was completely dead within maybe 18 shots. Again
Olympus Stylus 1010 10