Olympus Stylus 790SW

Viewfinder (0.0)
There isn’t room on the Olympus Stylus 790SW for an optical viewfinder. When swimming underwater and taking pictures of fish and coral, it’s doubtful anyone would want to use an optical viewfinder rather than the larger LCD.

The LCD has 100 percent accuracy. The refresh rate is a bit slow, however; when the camera is moved, lights leave a streaked trail and colors slide a bit, too; it looks like the view on a camera phone at times.

After a picture is taken, the view blacks out for about a half-second and then the recorded image appears on the screen for about two seconds so users can check it out. The display information can be changed on the 790SW, something that couldn’t be done on the older 770SW.

The info can be changed via the designated button to the lower left of the multi-selector. The screen can be blank, display a rule-of-thirds grid and exposure info, exposure info with a histogram, or exposure info only.

The exposure info displayed on the screen includes Exposure mode, shadow adjustment, Flash mode, white balance, ISO, drive, image quality, memory source, or number of images or video recording time left. When the shutter release button is pushed halfway and the exposure is locked, the selected shutter speed and aperture also appear.

LCD Screen (7.75)
The 790SW has the same size 2.5-inch HyperCrystal LCD as the 770SW. It also has the same 230,000-pixel resolution, twice as much as the oldest 720SW camera in Olympus’s waterproof line. The screen on both the 790SW and 770SW can be seen from above, below, and side to side, but the 790SW has a wider 176-degree viewing angle, up from the 770SW’s 140-degree viewing angle.

The 790SW advertises anti-glare technology, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. Or maybe it just works indoors. It was difficult to see the LCD at all outside. It looked washed out, but that might have been because of the overexposed images caused by poor metering. The problem is somewhat alleviated when the LCD brightness is boosted.

The LCD brightness can be adjusted in the Setup menu on a scale of +/- 2 in full steps. Make sure to adjust the brightness before venturing outside, because it’s hard to get to this obscure place in the menu when the screen is difficult to see.

Flash (5.75)
This point-and-shoot has the same weak and spotty flash as the Olympus 770SW. The published specs claim it can reach 0.66 to 12.5 feet in wide and 2 to 8.5 feet in telephoto when the ISO is set to 800, so the flash is actually much weaker than it sounds. Most manufacturers publish flash effectiveness specs using ISO 100 or lower, so Olympus is really trying to pull a fast one by throwing in an odd variable.

If the ISO is set to 80 or 100 (which it should be because of the higher noise levels that correlate with high ISO settings), then the flash is hardly effective beyond an arm’s length. Although subjects within an arm’s length are illuminated, harsh shadows frame them. It takes the flash about five seconds to recover from a shot before taking the next picture.

Pictures using the flash look terribly unnatural. There is a bright spot near the upper portion of the frame, and the corners and left and right sides of the image are darker than the rest. The flash is best avoided. There is an Available Light scene mode that bumps up the ISO and disables the flash, but it also shrinks the image size to 2048 x 1536 pixels, adds ugly noise and leads to overall poor image quality.

The flash be turned off, but there are a few Flash modes in case it is completely unavoidable: On, Auto, and Red-Eye Reduction. There isn’t a Slow Sync mode or flash exposure adjustment like on some other digital cameras. For instance, the Canon PowerShot SD750 has slow sync options and the Canon PowerShot A570 IS adds flash exposure adjustment.

The Olympus Stylus 790SW has a fairly unique solution to illuminating subjects in Macro mode. Most digital cameras can’t effectively light close-up subjects with the flash because it is either too bright or the lens casts long shadows. The 790SW fixes this by offering a bright LED on the front and an LED Super Macro mode, which lights up the scene without overpowering it.

Lens (6.75)
The Olympus 790SW has the same internal 3x optical zoom lens as the 720 and 770 models. It remains sealed inside the body and does not extend from the camera. The placement isn’t smart; it’s located on the front where the left fingers wrap around the camera body.

The lens measures 6.7-20.1mm, equivalent to a 38-114mm lens in the 35mm format. The tiny lens is composed of 10 lenses in 8 groups with 3 aspherical lenses. It has maximum apertures of f/3.5 in wide and f/5 in telephoto.

Olympus’s older 770SW had two buttons to control the lens, but the new 790SW has a single rocker-type control. Pushing the left side of the rocker zooms out, and pushing the right side zooms in. The rocker is fairly sensitive; it stops at nine focal lengths when zooming in and zooming out. There is a big jump from its widest focal length to the next step, though the rest of the range seems well represented.

The camera has a 5x digital zoom that should be avoided, as it degrades image quality. This can be turned on and off. The Fine Zoom function uses optical zoom along with image cropping to allow users to zoom up to 14x. According to Olympus, this function doesn’t impact image quality.