Olympus MJU 850SW

There’s no doubt that despite the complexity of modern digital cameras greatsteps have been taken to make them foolproof. Many digital cameras are rather less foolproof when it comes to everyday life and dealing with impact, dirt, being dropped, immersed in liquid or left in cold places and then brought into the warm – in short your average day’s skiing or snowboarding.
The Olympus mju 850SW seeks to address these needs by promising to be freezeproof, shockproof and waterproof… albeit within limits.

In terms of waterproofing, the 850SW can survive down to depths of 3m (which is rather further down than you can comfortably swim without practice or breathing aids. It’s not specifically an underwater camera as it lacks garish colouring, and above all positive buoyancy¬ – ie if you let go of it underwater, it will sink like a dark stone. In terms of its shockproofing, it is supposed to survive a 1.5m fall, which, according to school level physics (V2=U2+2AS), means it can survive an impact onto a hard surface at about 12 miles an hour, although it doesn’t mention how many of these falls it will take.

The freeze-proof nature of the camera is a moot point. Humans tend to cope rather less well than cameras with very low temperatures, and you wouldn’t really want to be using this camera at low temperatures without gloves, and the buttons on the camera wouldn’t let you use it with them.

So apart from the rugged build and bold claims, what else does the 850SW do or have?
Well it’s an eight megapixel model delivering images at 3264x2448 pixels, which means you should, if all the quality is there, be able to print pics at 16x12inches in size. It has a modest 3x zoom (equivalent to 38-114mm) that focuses from 0.5m to infinity in normal mode as to a rather disappointing 7cm closest focusing in so-called SuperMacro mode at the lens’s wideangle end. Probably of most importance with regard to the lens, is the placement of it in the top right hand corner of the camera when viewed from the front. This means it is all too easy for your left index finger to stray over it when you are trying to grip the camera more firmly by holding it two-handed.

Image metering is a choice of evaluative (known by Olympus as iESP) metering as well as spot metering. Other image brightness functions include the built in flash and the shadow adjustment function for backlit or contrasty scenes.
In terms of handling and ease of use, the camera’s svelte shape and smooth surface can make it harder to hold than some others, particularly with cold fingers or gloved hands, but other than that, it is a piece of cake to use, although not, it should be said, the fastest piece of cake around.

Its functions are clearly accessible from different individual buttons or by accessing the menus. There is a plethora of scene modes for automated shooting under different circumstances, although it must be said that the fully automatic program mode made a good fist of a wide variety of scenes. The 25 selectable scene modes include a number of underwater modes, just to underline the amphibian ambitions of this model.

In terms of exposures, the mju did very well indeed with its automatic metering doing a very good job of balancing light and dark. The camera’s anti-shake system is rather less perfect and boosts the ISO when required to help with low-light camera movement.

The focusing system is obviously neither the fastest nor the surest on the market, but did prove to be accurate as long as it could find something to bite on, and failures were few, and focusing problems tended to be mostly to do with trying to get closer to a subject than the lens would focus at, rather than any inaccuracy.

Image quality was a bit of a curate’s egg. Colours and fine detail could be rendered very well indeed, but when there were scenes where there were shadow areas, there was rather too much magenta and green speckles in those shadows for the image quality to be defined as fantastic. However, bright sunlit scenes, which there were plenty of during the gloriously sunny test period, were translated with beautifully saturated images full of detail that only broke down on very close examination.

So in terms of its target market’s composition of sporty action/adventure types, the Olympus mju 850SW delivers most when it is in situations that they are likely to use it in. I’d probably equally happily represent this as a kidproof camera, or at least as kidproof as any camera not hewn from granite and coated in an inch of neoprene is ever likely to be.

So how is the whole package? Well it takes decent pictures, is easy to use, is likely to survive most things better than the person holding it and given all the above, is actually very reasonably priced to boot. As a combination, that is actually a pretty compelling one.