Olympus Stylus 1050 SW

Size / Portability (7.75)
At 5.2 ounces (152 g) and 3.7 x 2.4 x 0.9 inches (93 x 62 x 22.6 mm), the 1050 SW feels substantial in your hand, but isn't heavy enough to diminish its pocketable portability.

Handling Ability (8.00)
We like the feel of the 1050 SW very much, whether you have dainty digits or generously proportioned paws. The camera depth of nearly an inch provides a firm hold top and bottom, and the lens and flash positions would be nearly impossible to obscure with a poorly placed finger. The shutter is the furthest-right control on top of the camera, making it easy to press when holding the 1050 SW either horizontally or vertically (there's even a little wedge-shaped bump beside the shutter button to keep you from accidentally pressing it).  As for the vaunted 'tap' control feature, let's deal with that in the next section.

The 1050 SW is compact but still easy to hold securely.

Control Button / Dial Positioning / Size (8.50)
The camera controls are well designed, with only a few minor peculiarities. Buttons have the right balance between give and resistance, making accidental presses unlikely while providing definite feedback when you have successfully entered a command. The four-way controller is a bit cramped, particularly the top button (exposure compensation), which lies perilously close to the mode dial. As long as you haven't gnawed away your thumbnail, though, you shouldn't have trouble hitting the targets, or the four rounded buttons positioned between the four-way controller's branches. The mode dial has a gnurled edge that's easily accessible by sliding your thumb along the right side. The only button that's particularly problematic is the recessed power button on the top surface, which is difficult to find and press quickly, but with the big, easy-to-use sliding lens cover doubling as an on-off switch, a flaw here is inconsequential. 

And what about the Tap Control that stands as the camera's marquee feature? It seems more clever than practical to us. The idea is interesting: by tapping on the camera top, sides and back, you can trigger different functions and settings. The main problem here is the fact that the functions controlled by tap aren't programmable: Olympus has decided what makes sense for you, which includes adjusting the flash mode (right-side tap), switching to playback mode (back tap), and turning shadow adjustment on or off (left side tap). While in playback mode, you can also tap to move forward or backward in the photo display or double-tap to turn on a slideshow. That's it, and in our estimation it's not much. Why not a tap control to adjust the white balance setting, or chose a different scene mode, or adjust exposure compensation? All three are far more useful choices than controlling shadow adjustment or flash mode. And even when using the flash or shadow adjustment tap settings, you have to not only tap the right or left side, but double-tap the top to confirm your choice. There is an exception to this tap control scenario: in the Snow scene mode, tapping the back of the camera twice takes a picture after a 2-second delay. This makes perfect sense for the mitten-bound photographer, but why not let you choose to use it when you're not in Snow mode?  All in all, tap control is too much trouble for too little convenience.
 

Controls are tightly packed
together but still manageable.

Menu (6.50)
The menu system seems a bit complex for what is essentially a fairly simple camera. There is a clearly marked MENU button on the back, but what you'll see when you press it depends entirely on where the mode dial rests at the time. While pondering the available menu selections, pressing the DISP button brings up a text block explaining your choices, a feature that should be helpful to newbies bravely venturing off the Auto mode path.

The full-auto and auto exposure modes are accompanied by simliar menus, except full auto mode blanks out the Camera Menu section, which includes white balance, ISO, drive, zoom, metering and focus mode controls. The Image Stabilization mode is similar to the auto exposure mode, except the ISO setting option is unavailable, since the camera takes over this setting. In all three shooting modes, the Panorama and SCN modes are displayed in outline form but unavailable: we wonder why they're shown on-screen at all. The illustration below displays the Camera Menu options:

The Reset option, available in both the Camera Menu and Playback Menu, returns all settings to camera defaults. The Setup option leads to identical menus, whether selected from Camera or Playback mode, as shown below.

Several menus are available in Playback mode. The Playback Menu itself offers only three choices: protect a file from erasure, rotate an image, and add a four-second audio clip to an existing photo. Perfect Fix, a separate selection available from the top mode menu, provides lighting and red-eye fixes. The Edit submenu offers image resizing and cropping, color edit and a calendar creation utility.

When the camera's in SCN mode, pressing MENU provides an illustrated listing of the 23 available scene modes (detailed in the  Custom Image Presets section here). In Guide mode, menu brings up the following list of plain-English choices to allow users to adjust image controls without necessarily understanding them:

The Movie Mode menu offers white balance setting, digital zoom on/off, meter mode and digital image stabilization (DIS) on and off.

The Favorites mode (represented by a star on the mode dial) has only two choices: store a photo as a favorite in built-in camera memory, and start a slideshow of your favorite shots.

In addition to the menus shown above, the Olympus Stylus 1050 SW also includes a quick menu, which the documentation refers to as the FUNC menu, not in misspelled tribute to George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, but because you press the OK/FUNC key in the center of the four-way controller to access it. In any shooting mode, this brings up an overlay with shooting mode, ISO, continuous shooting setting, metering mode and image size and quality arrayed down the left side. As you cursor down this column, your available options for each setting are shown at the bottom of the screen. Move the cursor left and right, hit the OK button and you've changed your setting. It's fast. It's easy to understand. We like it a lot. The version for auto exposure mode, which offers the greatest number of live options, is shown below.