Olympus Stylus 800

Auto Mode (7.5)
The Stylus 800 features a full auto setting, indicated by the camera icon on the mode dial. The manual refers to this as Program mode. It's an automatic mode, controlling both aperture and shutter speed selections, but it does not override menus settings for ISO or white balance. In addition, both ISO and white balance can be set to automatic within the menu, so the camera can be made fully automatic.

The camera's EV adjustment works in all modes, including Program and Scene modes. It adjusts exposure in 1/3 stops from two stops under the metered value to two stops over.

Movie Mode (3.5)
The Stylus 800 records video at 640 x 480, 320 x 240, or 160 x 120 pixel resolutions. Frame rate is limited to 15 fps, which is extremely inadequate for motion video and looks choppy onscreen; the frame rate is half the 30 fps necessary for full fluid motion. The optical zoom is also inactive during video recording, though you can set it before recording begins. If the digital zoom feature is turned on, it will work while you record, but with a nasty quality hit.

Drive / Burst Mode (7.5)
The Stylus 800 offers two continuous shooting modes. The typical mode, available in full resolution, captures successive images at 1.3 frames per second, which is average among cameras of this styling. However, the Stylus 800 also offers a High Speed burst mode, which is a bit unusual – it is only available at reduced resolution (3 MP), but is capable of recording images at a solid 4 frames per second for over 10 consecutive frames (depending on the quality setting). This is remarkably fast for any digital camera (excluding professional grade DSLRs) and is unparalleled among point-and-shoots. Unfortunately, this is just one instance where the user is forced to choose between resolution and a desired feature. The 4 fps recording speed is impressive, but Olympus markets the camera’s 8 megapixels of resolution over its recording rate, so users will likely be opposed to dropping down to 3 megapixels. It is a nice inclusion, but users will likely opt for 8 megapixel images at a 1.3 frames-per-second burst.

The Stylus locks the focus, exposure, and white balance settings at the start of a sequence, and the flash slows down the normal sequence mode. In high speed mode, the flash is shut off.

Playback Mode (7.0)
The Stylus 800's playback mode offers standard functionality; pressing the Playback button calls up the most recent shot. Pressing the zoom rocker in the wide angle direction brings up the index display, which shows the last several shots taken. The four-way controller scrolls sequentially through all images in the camera's memory. Pressing the zoom rocker in the telephoto direction magnifies the image up to 8x, which isn't bad, but not exactly an ideal gauge of sharpness of an 8 megapixel image. The index view can be set to show 4, 9, 16, or 25 images at a time.

The Stylus 800 includes a control to rotate images so they appear right-side up on the camera display. The orientation change is saved in the image file, so that it will display correctly the next time the camera is turned on. Pressing the Display button in Playback Mode controls what information is displayed with the image. You can remove all the text, have the regular shooting data, or have additional data appear, including a histogram display.

The Stylus 800 provides an "album" system for organizing pictures on a media card. Pictures can be added to an album one at a time, by date, or all the images on a card can be added. Once an album exists, it’s easy to call it up in playback and see the images, without having to sort through everything on the card.

The slide show function on the Stylus 800 includes several transitions: you can jump straight from one image to the next, fade between them, have one slide over the last image, or have them zoom open from the middle of the frame. The Stylus 800 also includes background music for slide shows. Olympus recommends using an AC adapter when showing slide shows for a long time; however, this will have to be an additional purchase, as the adapter does not come packaged with the camera.

The Stylus 800 includes editing functions. With them, it's possible to fix red-eye, change an image to black-and-white or sepia, or scale an image down to a smaller size. It's likely that you'll get better results editing images on a computer than with these tools, which are essentially automatic – except for the scale function, which permits saving the image in several different sizes, the editing tools are take-it-or-leave-it deals.

Custom Image Presets (8.5)
The Stylus 800 offers a wide variety of scene settings. When the mode dial is set to Scene, they can be selected using the menu. There are 19 preset options in all, compiling a fairly complete grouping of customized automatic modes for point-and-shooters to select from. They are: Landscape, which boosts blues and greens for outdoor scenes; Landscape plus Portrait, which boosts blues and greens, plus skin tones; Portrait, which "accentuates the skin texture of the subject," according to the manual; Indoor, which aims to maintain background tones while photographing people indoors; Sports, for freezing fast action; Beach and Snow, for photographing people against bright backgrounds; Behind Glass, which shuts off the flash to avoid reflections; Self Portrait plus Self Timer, to include the photographer in pictures while the camera is on a tripod; Self Portrait, for pictures when the photographer holds the camera at arm's length and points it at themselves; Sunset, which bumps up the red and yellow and shuts off the flash; Available Light Portrait, which shuts off the flash for portraits in low light; Night Scene, which allows extended exposure times, and which requires support for the camera; Night plus Portrait, for taking portraits in the dark, with a tripod or other support for the camera; Fireworks, which is a lot like Night Scene; Candle, which reproduces the colors of candlelit interiors, and shuts off the flash; Cuisine, which boosts colors for pictures of food; and Documents, which shuts off the flash and enhances the contrast between black type and white paper.