Labs

You may have seen the Mju 850sw on television being mistreated by a toddler and a dog. It gets thrown about, covered in water and used as a hammer and still manages to operate without a hitch.

The Olympus is proudly shock and waterproof so if you're a clumsy butter fingers then this might be the camera for you. Admittedly it's only waterproof to 3m but that's still quite some depth. The Mju 850sw lacks the manual controls of the other compacts here but it does have a rather impressive 25 automatic modes. Some of these include automatic compensation for underwater shots.

A 3x optical zoom and bright 2.5in LCD screen complement the 8-megapixel CCD. It also has image stabilisation

ADVERTISEMENT

built-in. Operationally the Olympus is generally simple to use but getting to the deeper functions did leave us scratching our head at times as it's not always entirely clear what's going on.

It's fair to say we weren't expecting much from the Olympus when we compared its specifications to the other cameras on test. It's very nice then, to be proved completely wrong. The Olympus, without any manual controls or fancy metering modes, managed to capture an incredibly accurate and detailed skin tone with exceptional detail. The 8-megapixel compact put the Canon G9 in the shade with an image that also had a great level of fine detail. It was let down by its white balance in the colour tests but again overall detail was exceptional for such a small camera, and the colours were punchy and pleasantly saturated.

You can treat the Olympus with very little respect when it comes to handling as it will take some punishment but you have to give it its dues where image quality is concerned. Some of the very expensive and much more heavily-engineered DSLRs were put in to the shade by this pocket camera. It might not have manual controls, but if you're after a small compact that will give bigger cameras a run for their money then the Mju 850 is a clear contender.