Olympus Stylus TOUGH-8000
Digital Camera Review
Jan 10, 2009
- By Tim Barribeau
The Stylus Tough-8000 from Olympus is the company's latest ruggedized camera, a follow-up to the 1030SW and 1050SW. It can survive 33 feet of water, 14°F cold and 220 lbs of pressure. We spent some hands-on time with it at the Consumer Electronics Show, and our first impressions follow. The Tough-8000 will be available in February for $399.99, with a 12-megapixel sensor and 3.6x zoom.
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Model Design / Appearance
The Tough-8000 lives up to its name. It's covered in a protective layer of metal, and really does feel like you could hit it with a golf club and it would survive absolutely fine.
Size and Handling
The Olympus is quite small, and has disturbingly small buttons for a camera meant to be taken to the slopes, where you would be wearing gloves. It has a pleasant heft to it, and doesn't feel overly light. Said heft comes with a warning, though. This camera may be water-proof, but it doesn't float. Drop it while diving, and it's heading to the bottom if you don't catch it. The Tough-8000 clocks in at 3.7"W x 2.4"H x 0.85"D (95mm x 61.7mm x 21.5mm), and weighs 6.4oz (182g).
The Tough-8000 has inherited the 1050SW's "tap control" scheme, where you can tap on different areas of the camera to access certain options, if you happen to be wearing gloves or can't use the buttons for some reason. You can tap on the left side of the camera for macro, the right for flash or the back for playback. In any of these, you then tap the side of the camera in the direction you want to scroll, and tap the top twice to okay your selection.
The Tough-8000 is small but sturdy.
Menu
Olympus' menu system for the Tough-8000 seems to take a cue from cellphones, with a series of large icons in a grid that lead on to sub-menus. This certainly differentiates it from the competition, and makes for a more graphically interesting setup. It's a bit hard to get used to for those of us who are accustomed to tabs and lists, but it's easy to read, and allows for a touch of visual flair (as you can see in the image below).
There are a number of different menus that you can access. You can press the Okay button to get to the most commonly changed settings: white balance, ISO, drive/burst, image size and image quality. Pressing Menu takes you to the primary menu system, and the OR button (which stands for Olympus Recommends), gives you access to some settings that Olympus feels the user would miss out on if they weren't told about. These are panorama, tap controls, shadow adjustment and multi-window. Shadow adjustment is for situations where you need a dynamic range bump, and multi-window shows multiple versions of what's the camera's pointing at with slightly different settings previewed. It can be set to zoom, exposure compensation or white balancing, and will show four variations on screen at once, and let you chose the one you want.
Ease of Use
The menus are all written with clear fonts and large icons, as well as a built-in help system to inform you about the options, all of which make the Tough-8000's menu system very easy to use.
