Olympus µ TOUGH 8010 review

Olympus Tough 8010: Does this heavyweight have quality as well as reliability?

Darting down a ski slope with the odd tumble shouldn’t stop you taking photos. Neither should mountain biking, or even surfing, for that matter. Olympus has set out to create an even Tough-er compact; a camera that enjoys being beaten up and pushed around to the limits of extreme hedonism. From its predecessor, the Tough 8000, there have been a couple of major upgrades; surprisingly, however, not to its armour plating. The camera is still capable of holding its breath to ten metres and has an outer shell that can resist a two-metre drop. It’s sit-on proof for up to 100kg of pressure, and can fight off freezing conditions all the way down to -10°C. In fact, there’s not much this Tough isn’t capable of withstanding. The only thing holding it back from perfection is its picture-taking abilities, which proves to be its Achilles’ heel among all these positives.

The upgrade to the Tough 8010 gives you a higher, 14MP resolution to play with to print up to poster sizes. Also, you’ll have the advantage of using a 5x optical wide-angle zoom that’s supported by a dual image stabilisation system – a must-have if you plan on undergoing rough terrain.   

The aesthetics of the Tough compact are what you’d expect, with screws for decoration on the front and a metallic-finished plate for the finger grip. The Tough 8010 has been given a double-locking cover to protect its important and more fragile parts. This keeps the memory card, battery and various connection ports (USB and HDMI) all safe and protected from dirt, water, knocks and drops.

From a practical point of view, the camera is easy to set up and to make changes to the exposure. The 2.7-inch LCD screen shows all the major exposure adjustments that you’ll need, such as macro, flash, white balance and the various exposure modes. All of these are down one side, so you don’t need to search through the in-camera menus to make a change. When altering white balance, for example, the LCD shows how each setting looks before the image is taken, which makes sure the right one is chosen first time around. One design feature that plays to its disadvantage is the lens’s position. Placed at the top, shooting with one hand is doable, however, if you use your left hand to steady the shot there’s a high risk of fingertips being a part of the scene.

The camera has Olympus’s TruePic III image processor to cope with the demanding and changing surroundings that it’s expected to experience. However, this isn’t the fastest processor we’ve come across. Dealing with fast-moving subjects one after the other causes problems, as it processes each capture at its own pace. Image quality also lacks the important dynamics which you’d have hoped for from a camera with such versatile attributes. Dealing with bright light and dark shadows is too much for its small lens to expose for. On the plus side, colours are vibrant and getting close to subjects isn’t a problem, with the Super Macro setting that shoots up to as close as three centimetres.

The Program mode opens up the camera’s manual options, including ISO (80-1600 and ISO High), exposure compensation and sequential shooting mode for moving subjects. The Sports scene mode helps speed things up, but it still felt slow to react from image to image. Start up time rolls over into the seconds, a time delay that proves vital if you ever need to capture that impromptu one-off moment.

For an artistic finish you can choose from four available Magic modes: Pop Art, Pin Hole, Fish Eye and Sketch. Olympus has made a Tough of two halves. It’s creative and hardened, which is perfect for treating with a heavy hand. However, unfortunately the final results don’t live up to our expectations for a camera at the £400 mark.