OLYMPUS STYLUS 790 SW

Reviewed March 2008

Introduction

Point-and-shoot digital camera makers make many claims about their products, but few boast about the toughness of their snappers as Olympus does about its 7.1 megapixel Stylus 790SW ($239-$350). What sets this byteshooter apart from others in its class is its "take me into harm's way" attitude. It's shockproof, waterproof and freezeproof. With those kinds of features, you'd think the unit would look the part, but it doesn't. In fact, its demeanor is quite ordinary--more Chevy Aveo than Hummer.

Aside from its durability, the 790SW has a pretty standard feature set. It has a 3x optical zoom that's the equivalent of a 38-114mm zoom in a 35mm film camera. Given that the camera is modeled for taking licks in the outdoors, a little wider lens would have been better suited for capturing nature's ways. However, the unit has a panorama mode that can be used to click wide landscape shots in a pinch. What's more, it has two macro modes. One allows you to get within 0.7 feet of subject for a shot, but the other--Super Macro--lets you get within 2.3 inches of a target. The zoom has a tight aperture range of f3.5 to f5.0. Top light sensitivity, or ISO, setting is 1600.

The unit’s display is ample in size at 2.5 inches and has excellent viewing properties. As is common in this category, the camera doesn’t not have an optical viewfinder.

The camera has a menu system that's easy to understand and use. Menu systems can be a bane for digital cameras because they can force a photographer to descend into a nested mess before finding what they want. And as any shutterbug knows, you can't capture a moment if you're spending it looking through menus. Olympus, as have some other camera makers, addresses that problem by offering alternative ways to access key features. There's a quick menu that can be displayed by pressing a single button. It gives you access to items like white balance, light metering modes, ISO and sequential shooting modes. What's more, the four points of the product's arrow pad are shortcuts to menus for controlling exposure compensation, the flash, the self-timer and macro mode. While these quick access features help avert the need to delve into nested menus on the fly for most frequently used tasks, it would have been nice to have that kind of access for the unit's image quality menu and its erase-all-images-in-the-camera item.

Overall picture quality from the camera was good. I was impressed by the accuracy of the pre-sets in the unit. There are 21 scene modes covering everything from landscape shots to night portraiture to fireworks, and they offer a swift way to capture certain stock situations without fiddling with lots of settings.

Athough the camera supports video, it consumes so much memory--especially at its highest quality, SHQ--that it seems of limited value. At SHQ, for instance, a 1MB storage card can hold only about 10 seconds of video.

A bonus with all Olympus cameras is their software package. The company's Master 2 program is a robust application for organizing and editing photos. While it's no substitute for professional photography packages for those functions, it can help many shutterbugs keep their photo collections under control.