Olympus shows rugged cam with art filters
updated 09:00 am EDT, Fri July 17, 2009
Olympus mju TOUGH-6010
Olympus chose Friday to introduce a new generation of its hardened TOUGH-series compact cameras. The mju TOUGH-6010 (to be called the Stylus TOUGH-6010 in the US) is superficially a standard 12-megapixel camera with 3.6X zoom but is waterproof to a depth of 9.8 feet, withstands drops up to 4.9 feet and will avoid freezing at temperatures as low as 14F. Magic Filters are new to the 6010 and, like the Art Filters on the E-P1 and full DSLRs, can either simulate real effects like a pinhole camera's or else strictly artistic visuals like an Andy Warhol-style Pop Art filter.
Tap control continues on and lets users browse pictures, enable flash or invoke other features by tapping different parts of the camera, all potentially useful when taking shots with gloves or when it's otherwise harder to use regular controls. Optical image stabilization, shadow compensation and an automatic scene selection mode all help produce better images. Olympus ships the xD- and microSD-capable TOUGH-6010 to Europe this month for an unspecified price and is expected to produce an American version in the near future. [via DPReview]
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 1999
How About Better Pictures
I have a Olympus Stylus 1030SW 10MP "tough" camera. I bought it for snorkeling and outdoorsy stuff where I'd worry about my "real" camera.
It's great to be able to swim with it and dive down 20 or more feet, but the photos it takes out of the water are not very good. They're soft and grainy, even in pretty much ideal conditions, full sunlight. If I shoot at 5MP the results are MUCH better than 10MP.
The camera itself is well made and the interface is quite good... a mix between Nikon CoolPix and Canon ELPH.
Anyway, I would have hoped that Olympus would work on improving image quality, rather than adding fluff features that one would rarely use, if ever.