Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 130
 Really surprised it is such a poor camera March 16, 2008
Elwood P. Dowd (Carrboro, NC United States)
35 out of 45 found this review helpful
Just got the green version last week as a tougher and easier-to-carry replacement for my Canon S60, then went on a weekend trip to the beach with the family. We split our time and pictures between hotel room, pool, and beach, so we got pictures in a bunch of different settings and lighting conditions.
Overall, I have to say the pictures all leaned toward muddy, with weak color, and simply not so good. Slow focusing was a consistent problem. Maybe I have been spoiled by my earlier cameras (this is my first non-Canon compact digicam), but Olympus has no excuse for making such a mediocre camera in this price range. I know they can do better, they just don't seem to be trying. If Olumpus is skimping on the camera to pay for making it tough and still hit the $399 MSRP price point, they should consider just putting in the effort to make it a good camera and charging $449. I would have given a good camera a better review (I only pay for the camera once, but I use it 8,000 times).
I gave it an extra star for being so immersable and droppable, which is totally cool. It made me feel better when my five-year-old would pick it up and start snapping.
For the nearly $400, I simply expected a better camera. This one will get returned.
 Rugged and waterproof, but takes lousy pictures May 27, 2008
Michael Trotman (Daniel Island, SC USA)
27 out of 34 found this review helpful
Olympus Stylus 1030SW 10.1MP Digital Camera with 3.6x Optical Wide Angle Zoom (Silver)
This is a nice camera if you're looking primarily for a camera that is small, rugged, and waterproof. However, if you're looking for a camera that takes great pictures - keep looking. The image quality is terrible so forget the 10.1 mega pixel feature. And since the 3.6 optical zoom is hardly enough to zoom in on far away objects the poor image quality becomes a big deal. When you crop a photo in an attempt to "zoom" digitally, you can see terrible pixilation, grain, and blur.
I considered sending the camera back to Amazon, but decided to keep it for taking photos in the water. If I didn't want that feature I would have definitely returned it for something else.
 Lovin' It April 12, 2008
J. W. Vincent (St. Paul, MN)
25 out of 25 found this review helpful
Bought this a little over a week ago, just after testing my underwater housing for my Canon S30 and finding it was leaking. We were leaving for five days of snorkeling in Cozumel and I wanted to be able to take underwater pictures. The Stylus 1030SW really fit the bill. Got a 2GB Olympus card and spare battery. The card was more than enough capacity and I was really pleased with how many shots I could take on a single battery charge. Over the 5 days I took over 800 photos and one battery usually lasted most of the day, even though I had the camera on most of the time I was in the water. I'm sure I surface dove to 15 and 20 ft a number of times, so, the 1030 was a better solution for me than the 850 would have been. I also really like the wider angle (effective 28mm). Camera worked great underwater and for other vacation shots. I usually turned the flash off underwater since shots taken with it would have lots of spots from reflection off all the little bubbles and stuff in the water, but, got some real nice fish & coral photos anyway. It can be tough to see the LCD in real bright conditions, and, the black is just paint (one time when getting out I got trown by a wave and slammed the camera into the coral bottom scratching the paint but otherwise the camera was uneffected). I'm very impressed with the quality of the photos this little camera is giving me, the range of adjustments, and, after a fairly short learning curve, the ability to adjust the settings pretty easily. I also got the floating strap which does keep this heavy little beast from going to the bottom if you happen to lose hold of it. I'm very pleased with this camera so far and looking forward to using it a lot, particularly taking it along biking, hiking, camping and other active outdoor uses.
 Buyer beware May 28, 2008
Matthew W. Norman (Atlanta, GA)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
Bought this product about one week before a ten day vacation in the British Virgin Islands. Tested the camera beforehand. Have shot exclusively in Digital SLR for last four years. Wanted a waterproof camera for snorkeling and the beach. The 10 megapixels was a plus. Minimal shutter-lag was also a plus.
Here was the big downside . . . the LCD quit working after four days. We took the camera in the water each day. Never exceeded the fine print of only one hour in the water at a time. Nor did we exceed the depth recommendations. However, the lcd quit after taking it to a pool for about one hour on the 3rd day of the trip.
Tried to contact tech support at Olympus, which promptly sent an automated reply that I would hear within 48 hours. Over one week later, I received a disappointing email that stated I could send the camera back and may be responsible for the expense.
The camera shot great pictures . . . when it worked. A brand new camera as well as a new product for Olympus should not be so unreliable. Perhaps your purchase will not react the same way . . . but buyer beware. Buy at your own risk!
Good for watersports, not great on land. April 14, 2008
Jill (san francisco, ca)
20 out of 24 found this review helpful
I spend a lot of time on and in the water and I bought this camera to stick in my pocket and go. It is very good for that. For general purpose use though it is poor-to-mediocre in comparison to other point and shoot digitals at this price that I looked at. I usually shoot slide film/ SLR, but I figured for the price this camera would probably take acceptable pictures.
The good: the macro mode works very well and is fun to use. The underwater thing is as cool as it sounds. The camera is well built and rugged and easy to carry around. The battery life is outstanding. All in all it should be a great outdoors person's pocket camera
The bad. The biggest problem (and it is a huge one) is the horrible program mode system. The lack of an aperture or shutter priority setting is a major, major issue in light of the bizarre pre-sets on this camera.
For starters, the camera sets the aperture wide open, no matter what you're actually trying to take a picture of. I shot about 150 pictures in "Landscape" and "Portrait & Landscape" modes last week and every time the camera set the aperture to the max allowed by the zoomed lens, usually f/3.5. Even if you point it at a fluorescent light or bright water (so there are no low-light issues) it does not stop down. This is stupid. It means that the only thing in focus in most of the "landscape" photos was a tree-branch in the foreground or some guy's hat. There is no manual override. Apparently it is a fixed aperture camera. The only way is to zoom to the max which only has a max aperture of up to 5.6 or so. Of course this means that the wide angle feature is useless for landscapes.
Even if you manage to get an appropriate f-stop, the camera has a problem picking appropriate ISO and shutter speeds, especially in low light. It seems to prioritize for low ISO, meaning that it also slows the shutter speed down, resulting in blurry and noisy photos. A speed of 1/40s with ISO 80 is pretty useless in terms of getting good handheld pictures vs speed of 1/250 and ISO 200, for example. Using the LED seems to fix this in the Macro mode but in other modes the camera insists on reducing shutter speed and opening up the lens inappropriately. You can set the ISO manually but the modes are fiddly and it's easy to forget if you switch back and forth a lot.
Finally my autofocus simply refuses to focus on anything more than about 70' away. Even if I confirm spot-focus before shooting on a distant object it will be blurry in the final picture, while random closer objects are in focus.
It is possible that there is something wrong with the camera I have as I can't imagine anyone designed it this way (right?). However I went to a local camera store and tried their two display models and had the same issues. It's going back.
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