Olympus Stylus 1050 SW

Noise
Image noise is the visible speckling you see if you look closely at areas of smooth color in a digital photo. Generally speaking, if you're just going to look at your photos on a computer screen or output 4x6' prints, moderate levels of image noise won't be very noticeable. However, as soon as you start cropping and enlarging a section of an image significantly, or tweaking your photos using image editing software, the grainy-looking image noise imperfections can become a major distraction. 

To test for noise performance, we shoot a well-lit color chart, at all available ISO levels, then analyze the resulting images using Imatest software.

Noise – Manual ISO (4.85)
We expect to see image noise increase as ISO settings increase, but the 1050 SW started out with a lot of image noise at ISO 80 and 100, and the situation quickly got worse as the light sensitivity was raised. It looks like the camera tried to use a digital noise reduction filter after it passed ISO 400, but it didn't help much.
 

The margin of difference between the 1050 SW and the Fujifilm and Pentax cameras isn't terribly significant, though it's surprising to see the Olympus 1030 SW surpass the new 1050 SW by a substantial margin.

Auto Noise (1.10)
For this test we set the camera to Auto ISO and let it choose an appropriate setting for our well-lit lab chart. Many compact cameras fall down here by choosing a higher-than-necessary ISO setting, and since higher ISO translates to higher image noise, come up with low scores. In this case, the 1050 SW shot at ISO 200, a not unreasonable setting, but its poor overall noise profile still left it near the bottom of the pack.

Low Light (5.57)
In our white balance testing, we determined that the 1050 SW does a nice job reproducing colors accurately when using flash. That doesn't make it any less obnoxious to walk around a party blasting a flash into peoples' faces, though, or startling that adorable baby with a couple thousand lumens in the puss. To avoid harsh lighting and calling attention to our candid photography efforts, we want our cameras to shoot well even in challenging low-light situations. To test this ability, we shoot our color chart at four illumination levels, ranging from 60 lux (a comfortable indoor lighting level) down to 5 lux (roughly the illumination from a single candle), and analyze these photos for color accuracy and image noise.

As you can see in the Imatest charts above, the 1050 SW performed reasonably well under low lighting. Color values aren't spot-on, but they are as accurate as we expect from a compact camera, and the performance is very consistent across the widely differing light levels.

We also test for long exposure performance, ideally with shutter speeds ranging up to 30 seconds, but this is often impossible with compact cameras. Many, like the Olympus 1050 SW, offer no direct control of shutter speed and, even when shutter speed control is provided, the longest exposure generally falls far short of half a minute. In this case, we were able to tease out a 1-second exposure by using the camera's Night Scene mode, which produced a decent image, consistent with the performance we found elsewhere in our testing: reasonable color accuracy, higher-than-desired image noise.

Overall, the 1050 SW falls in with the rest of the pack on low light performance, though again it comes up short when compared to the admittedly pricier 1030 SW.

Olympus 1050 SW Low Light Scores

Still Life
For each review we shoot the same two scenes, our happy manequin couple on the couch and a diorama featuring Rosie the Riveter and her friends, at each available ISO level, using the camera's automatic exposure setting under fluorescent light. For comparison purposes, the full-size images are available by clicking on the thumbnails below. The original files are large, so beware, all ye with slow Internet connections.

Video Performance (5.80)
For a camera designed with an active lifestyle in mind, the video mode has special importance: those YouTube moments when your snowboarding buddy becomes one with a pine tree that didn't jump out of his way fast enough are aching to be captured with the water- and cold-resistant 1050 SW. To see if the camera was up to the job, we started by measuring color and noise performance under two types of illumination – very bright 3000 lux lighting and subtler 30-lux illumination. All our video tests are conducted by shooting a few seconds under controlled lab conditions, grabbing frames from the sequence and analyzing these images using Imatest.