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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Auto Mode
Manual controls on the Tough-8000 are limited; basically there are only automatic modes. You get iAuto mode, which tries to judge the best scene mode for you, standard Auto mode, Scene mode (discussed in the Custom Image Presets section below) and Beauty, which touches up faces.
Movie Mode
Movies are recorded in AVI format, at 640x480 and 320x240 resolution, 30 or 15 fps.
Drive / Burst Mode
Burst modes and timers are activated using the down button on the four way pad. Unfortunately, we weren't able to judge the speed of the bursts, but we'll analyze this when we get the camera in for review..
Playback Mode
In Playback, you can zoom up to 10x, and pull back to thumbnail view of 4, 9, 16 or 25 images. For editing there's Red-Eye Fix, Shadow Adjustment Edit, Beauty Fix, Resize, Cropping, Black & White, Sepia, Calendar and Saturation. Most of these are fairly self explanatory, Beauty Fix smears over your skin in orderto repair your apparent flaws, Shadow Adjustment tries to bump up your dynamic range in situations where an area is under exposed, and Calendar sticks your image into one of a number of different calendars for printing.
Custom Image Presets
The Tough-8000 has a wide-ranging 19 scene modes, a number of which are designed for use underwater. There is: portrait, landscape, night scene, night+portrait, sport, indoor, candle, self portrait, sunset, fireworks, cuisine, documents, beach & snow, snow, pre-capture movie, underwater snapshot, underwater wide1, underwater wide2 and underwater macro.
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