Olympus MJU 1030SW

Before he started hanging around on railway sidings talking to the engines, Ringo Starr wanted to live under the sea. Or at least that’s what he told us in his second-most famous Beatles song, Octopus’s Garden.

Like most rock stars, the drummer has many homes around the world; but we’re not aware of any that are subaqua. Just in case he does manage to fulfil this dream, Hello ought to get hold of an Olympus [mju:]1030 SW, for whopping 10.1MP shots of his front lawn.

That’s a long way round of saying that while Olympus’s latest ticks all the boxes you’d expect for a digital compact these days, it also has the rather more exceptional ability to take photographs up to ten metres below water.

The case has been carefully ruggedised and made airtight, with seals around the lens cover, USB port and battery compartment. These meet the standards laid down for IEC 529 IPX8 compliance, which basically means you can take this to the beach with you and not stop shooting when the kids go for a snorkel.

It still feels somehow wrong that after using it in the sea, the instructions suggest immersing the camera in a bucket of fresh water for ten minutes to get the salt off. No amount of badges of compliance on the front will ever make us feel safe doing that.

As pleasant as all this is, though, it’s nothing new for Olympus. The SW range has been around for a couple of years now, and proven its worth. Even more than its siblings, the 1030 is a true adrenaline junkie who can’t lay off the extreme sports; an all-round action hero.

The lovely anodised exterior is scratchproof, shockproof and crushproof. It’ll withstand 100kg of weight – or one reasonably rotund man – loaded onto it, and get up from a fall of two metres onto a concrete surface ready to fight.

And just in case you were planning to use it as a stretcher for carrying a wounded polar bear over a set of arctic rapids, it’s also certified to work at temperatures of -10 degrees C.

Far from being some horribly deformed cross between a soldier ant and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, though, the 1030 SW is also a very attractive camera. Somehow, Olympus has managed to cram all that tough outdoorsmanship into a snapper that’s barely larger or more expensive than any comparative compact that hasn’t been through boot camp.

It’s quite an achievement. The camera sits well in the pocket without taking too much out of it first, so to speak.

There’s nothing to criticise in terms of controls either. Everything is easy to reach and never more than a click away, and the camera itself sits comfortably in the palm. If there are any complaints about using the 1030 SW it’s that the flash tends to kick in too soon in Auto mode, overexposing an already bright scene.

There is one expected physical trade-off, though. Under all that armour, it is slightly heavier than is usual.

Realistically, the only thing you trade for the indestructibility of the 1030 SW is a ‘proper’ antishake system. There’s a control wheel switch for a high sensitivity mode, but no mechanical sensor shift. With a relatively short zoom lens, though, this isn’t really a problem.

More importantly, picture quality itself is good. Colour-wise, there’s an excellent balance between natural feel and vibrant hues, and while image detail isn’t fantastic, it’s on a par with most others in its class.

Targeting a 10MP sensor it takes a bigger bit of glass than the lens of a hand-held compact to capture the veins in a dragonfly’s wings from six feet away, so don’t be surprised if you can’t crop your images too tightly for a final frame. Perhaps more problematic is the large amount of image noise beyond ISO 400, but again this is not unusual for the class.

Overall, it’s a camera that’s hard to find a fault with and is a genuine all-rounder. It’s as perfect for gap year shenanigans as it is for being mauled by babies.

There’s one thing that we wish had been better, though, and that’s the screen. Use the 1030 SW indoors and the display is fantastic: sharp, bright and as colourful as a bag of Haribo. On a summer’s day, though, or more ironically, when used underwater, it’s virtually invisible. Which defeats the object a little bit.

It’s all very well being able to take this camera literally anywhere to fire off snapshots, but if you’re firing blindly when you get there, don’t expect to be selling the images to Magnum.

Of course, the only real remedy for this will be to add a basic optical viewfinder to the next-generation 12MP version of the SW series. The campaign for Olympus to do that starts here.