Olympus MJU Tough-8000
£270.00
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Olympus is the manufacturer that started the trend for durable and waterproof compacts with the first Tough model some years back. The MJU Tough-8000 is a much more advanced beast than its forefathers, but the 12 megapixel camera retains a lot of what the brand sets out to offer.
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The Olympus MJU Tough-8000 has a really nice design with its rugged look, yet still looks rather trendy with it. It also offers one of the best waterproof depth performances of compacts in its class, at a superb 10m. The Tough designation kind of highlights the fact that the MJU 8000 is a well-built camera, being shockproof up to 2m. It’s also designed to be freezeproof down to -10 degrees Celsius and crushproof under 100kg of pressure.
Optical zoom comes in the form of a 3.6x magnification that provides the 35mm equivalent focal length of 28-102mm. The MJU Tough-8000 also benefits from a dual image stabilisation system that helps you reduce the potential of blurred images through camera shake. On the back of the camera sits the 2.7in Hyper Crystal III LCD, which offers plenty of detail through its 230k dot resolution and is a great platform for framing, viewing and menu operation.
The layout of this compact is very similar to the Panasonic, in that you have a rotating command wheel for the selection of the main shooting modes and a cross array of buttons below that. This makes the operation very intuitive and this helps when you’re underwater. The camera has an intelligent auto mode (iAuto) that detects the five most commonly used scenes and then sets the exposure, focus and camera settings automatically to suit that scene. Face Detection is also offered to help give accurate focus and exposure for portrait shots.
The illuminator LED provides light for underwater and macro shots, where the flash would be too harsh. The movie mode on the MJU is not HD at 640x480/30fps, but can be used in and out of the water.