Olympus Stylus TOUGH-8000

Handling (7.00)

The Tough 8000 is a chunky camera, but it fits well into the hand, with the raised ridge on the front of the case providing something for the fingertips to grip. This is good, as the shiny metal coating of the case can get very slippery with sweaty or wet fingers. We also found this metal finish to be rather prone to getting scratched; even after light use, our review model had several prominent scratches on the front of the camera body.

Buttons & Dials (7.50)

The shutter and zoom buttons are well placed, with the index finger falling naturally onto the shutter button. The zoom buttons are rather small, but fall naturally under the tip of the thumb. It is also possible to turn the mode dial with the thumb, meaning that you can change the shooting mode while shooting one handed. However, accessing the other controls (including the menu to choose the scene modes) requires two hands.

The Tough 8000 does provide an alternative way to navigate through the touch control feature. When this is enabled, you can access a number of features by tapping a side of the camera body. Tapping the back puts you into playback mode, while tapping the left side enables the macro setting and the right the flash. You can then navigate the options with single taps, and two taps on the top of the body selects the chosen option. The idea is that you can control the camera while wearing gloves, and it works well, as far as it goes. However, it does not allow you access to all of the features; if you want to control anything other than the macro and flash, you have to use the small OK button to navigate the

Menus (5.00)

The menus for this camera are broken down into two sections: the function menu accessed by pressing the OK button, and the main menu that comes from the menu button. The function menu allows you to control options such as the ISO speed, drive mode, metering pattern, etc. This is pretty straightforward to navigate; the directional keys move up and down and left and right select the options for the chosen setting, which is shown at the bottom of the screen.

The main menu system for the Tough 8000 is rather more awkward to use. The large icons make it mostly obvious how features are divided, but the features themselves are scattered across several sub-menus that aren’t logically structured. Image size and quality get a top-level option of their own, but the image stabilizer feature is buried near the bottom of the camera menu.

The function menu of the Tough 8000	The main menu of the Tough 8000

Manual & Learning (5.00)

An 84-page manual is included with the Tough 8000 (in both English and Spanish) which covers the features of the camera in resonable detail. It doesn’t really explain the more complex features well, though: some (such as the image stabilization and the shadow adjust feature) only get a short explanation that doesn’t really help the user to understand what they do.