Olympus Tough TG-1 Digital Camera Review

Sharpness

Image sharpness is generally strong on the Olympus TG-1. The center of the frame is consistently the sharpest at all focal lengths, no surprise. We measured as many as 2400 MTF50s at the wide-angle setting. Edge sharpness is still respectable, averaging about 1500 MTF50s across the focal range. The softest areas are midway between the center and edge, dropping to about an average of 1050 MTF50s. That's still a pretty good result for a compact with an all-internal lens.

As with any point-and-shoot, there's some artificial edge enhancement at work, which boosts the sharpness scores. It's most noticeable at the wide-angle. But in general, it's applied judiciously, and doesn't hurt the overall image quality at regular viewing sizes.

The TG-1 is arguably the sharpest tough-cam right now. It beat all of its competitors in our lab tests aside from the Nikon AW100, but the Nikon has the most egregious artificial edge enhancement we've seen. The TG-1 preserves overall detail much more clearly than the AW100. More on how we test sharpness.

Image Stabilization

The TG-1 has built-in optical image stabilization. It struggled in our lab test—some cameras just don't do well with the unnatural side-to-side shaking that we apply—but in the real world, it's good for a few extra stops of shutter stability. We could shoot at 1/13s with crisp results.