Olympus Stylus 790SW

Manual Control Options
There aren’t many manual controls. It is designed to be a camera for those on the go: climbing mountains, paddling rivers, traversing continents, and running through rainstorms. For those quickie photo moments, most users won’t stop and think about manual white balance (which doesn’t exist on this camera) or setting the shutter speed (also not an option).

Focus
Auto Focus (6.75)
The Olympus 790SW’s autofocus system is slow. When users push the shutter release button down, it takes about 0.7 seconds for the camera to actually record the picture. By then, the rare fish you saw will be hidden in the kelp again. This camera uses a CCD contrast detection autofocus system, so it only gets worse when the lights are low and there isn’t much contrast to work with. There is no manual focus to fall back on in these situations.

A small white bracket shows where the camera is focusing. It chooses the right subject most of the time, even if it is off-center.

Face detection can be turned on in the Camera menu under the AF mode option. It seems to recognize only one face at a time – and sometimes it thinks boxes and other items are faces. It doesn’t work well and only slows the autofocus system down even more. The older 770 didn’t have face detection, but this system isn’t a big step up, anyway.

The tiny 3x lens and the camera’s autofocus system combine to focus as close as 7.9 inches in Macro mode when the lens is zoomed out. When zoomed in, the lens can only focus as close as 11.8 inches. Normally, it can focus from 19.7 inches.

There are Macro, Super Macro, and Super Macro with Flashlight modes. The latter is the most interesting. This is a fairly unique concept. Almost all compact digital cameras’ flashes are ineffective when shooting close-up subjects; this is true for the Stylus 790SW, too. Most cameras have no solution to the problem, though. The 790SW solves the lighting issue by firing its own light: the LED flashlight isn’t bright enough to blow out subjects like the flash does, but is bright enough to illuminate them. The flashlight stays on during the shot. The camera doesn’t have a true autofocus assist lamp that turns off before the shot; this LED stays on until manually turned off.

Manual Focus (0.0)
As expected, there is no manual focus on this digital camera. This isn’t surprising for a point-and-shoot that fits in a pocket.

ISO (8.25)
The 790SW has the same ISO range as the older 770SW. The Stylus 790SW has Auto, 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600 options available at full resolution. These choices can be found in the Function menu or, with a few more strokes of the thumb, in the Camera menu. Bumping up the ISO allows users to turn off the spotty and weak flash, but introduces signal noise from the CCD into the image. There are more details in the test section of this review, but the basic idea is that ISO settings beyond ISO 400 have way too much noise.

There is a so-called Digital Image Stabilization mode on the mode dial, but it doesn’t involve floating optics or shifting sensors. It simply tells the camera to increase the ISO and quicken the shutter speed, which reduces blur but adds noise. In addition, this mode often uses the flash, which instantly makes pictures look bad.

White Balance (6.25)
Also available in the separate Function and Camera menus is the white balance. There is an Automatic setting along with Daylight, Overcast, Tungsten, and three Fluorescent presets. There isn’t a Manual white balance mode, which is typical of mostly automated point-and-shoot digital cameras. It would have been helpful, though – especially when venturing underwater or in other strangely-lit circumstances.

We tested the accuracy of the white balance; the results are in the Testing/Performance section of this review. Let’s just say that neither the automatic nor the preset modes are that reliable, causing poor overall color accuracy.

Exposure (7.0)
The exposure can be easily adjusted on a +/- 2 scale with a push of the top of the multi-selector. Most cameras show a scale along the bottom of the LCD and show a live preview, but the Olympus 790SW shows three or four thumbnail previews – each with a 1/3 EV increase or 1/3 decrease from the thumbnail next to it. Users can scroll through the tiny previews and pick the one of their choice. This is an interesting but still effective choice.

For those few point-and-shooters who want to monitor the exposure closely, a histogram can be viewed by pushing the display button.

Metering (7.25)
The camera’s metering control is located in the Function and Camera menus, but it only works when the shadow adjustment option is turned off. There is also a Spot mode available in the menu. When the face detection autofocus option is activated, the metering system bases its measurements on the detected face.

The metering system seemed to have problems in Movie mode; when objects moved across the frame, the exposure flickers.

Shutter Speed (0.0)
The Olympus Stylus 790SW has an automated shutter speed range of 4 to 1/1000 of a second. Most of the time, the camera doesn’t flip the shutter any slower than a half-second, but it does slow things down in the Night scene mode. When shutter speeds slow beyond a half-second, the noise reduction system automatically kicks in.

Aperture (0.0)
The aperture of this tiny lens isn’t very wide. It maxes out at f/3.5, a few stops smaller than the typical f/2.8 found on most compact digital cameras. When the lens is zoomed in, the aperture shrinks even more, down to f/5. This doesn’t allow as much light to hit the image sensor, so users have to compensate by activating the awful flash or increasing the ISO sensitivity.