Product Reviews

Before Apple's iPod came along, MP3 players were toys for nerds. Now they're a fashion statement. Canon's trying to do the same for digital cameras - its mju cameras are renowned for their slim, compact design, distinctive looks and range of funky colours. At first glance, however, there is very little - apart from its stylish finish - to distinguish this camera from many other basic point-and-shoots.

There are very few manual controls, shutter speed and aperture and that's about it. If you want to achieve a specific effect - tailoring your settings to particular lighting conditions for instance - you'll have to use one of the preset shooting modes (these include a night mode, landscape mode and so on). The camera also has a 'guide' setting, one of its most interesting new features. The guide is basically a Q&A - you're asked what conditions you're shooting in and what you want to achieve, you tell it and it sets the camera up for you. This is even easier than choosing a preset mode and will be a real help to novice users.

Bright capture technology

The 2.5in LCD preview screen is bright and has good viewing angles, we were particularly impressed with how much easier it made composing and shooting pictures at night. Taking pictures with a compact camera in low light can often lead to poor results. Olympus' 'Bright Capture' technology is designed to address this. This works partly because the camera has a very high range of ISO settings which determines how it uses

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the information captured by its CCD light censor. The higher the ISO setting the more sensitive the mju 700 is to light which, in theory, allows you to take pictures in low light. But there are serious limitations. The high level of signal amplification results in lots of image noise at high ISO settings, so much so that pictures look almost dappled. The Olympus tries to get around this by dropping picture resolution to 2048 x 1536 at high ISO settings, presumably in the hope that the digital noise will be less noticeable. It doesn't work.

Not all bad

Even in bright daylight, image quality wasn't impressive. At first glance the pictures looked okay, but on close inspection, even images shot in perfect conditions at the lowest ISO setting (which generates the least digital noise) suffered from clearly visible digital artifacts and smeary details. They also appeared to have been subjected to too much in-camera processing and optimisation, which you have no control over. Colour rendition is OK, but oversaturated and the auto white balance was more easily fooled indoors, giving an orangey-yellow tint.

Metering is good, exposures are generally accurate except in high-contrast situations whereit is more hit and miss. There is a spot-metering option that helps to combat difficult exposure situations. However, default contrast seems to be set too high so that you lose detail in highlights or shadows more readily.

This is a also slow camera - when taking or reviewing photos, you'll often be left waiting. When using flash, you can be left as long as 6 seconds between shots. Some cameras can speed through a hundred photos in a few seconds; here, with shots taken at maximum resolution, it is closer to one per second that can be quite frustrating.

It's not all bad, though some users will like the punchy colours and shooting without flash has many benefits. It's great for social photography and, if you value ambience and fast shutter speeds over detail then it maybe worth considering, but ultimately, we feel that the loss in quality is too great.