Digital Trends

Olympus Stylus 800 August 30th, 2005 | by David Elrich

Performance

This camera is a speed demon. Startup is practically instantaneous from when you press the power button with the zoom lens quickly popping out into position (less than two seconds). I only wish the power button was a bit larger since I had to use the edge of a fingernail to engage it. With a fully charged battery it was time to put the camera through its paces. Although point-and-shoot with a ton of Scene modes (19 to be exact) covering almost every option you can think of, the Stylus 800 also has aperture and shutter priority modes, settings not found of most point-and-shoot digicams. There are also white balance options galore and a true standout--ISO options up to 1600, just like the Fujifilm FinePix F10.

In fact, both of these cameras tout their low light and available light shooting capability. After using them both, it's hard to argue with company claims. Olympus calls it Bright Capture and Fuji dubs it Natural Light. No matter what the companies call the technology, it's great since you can take much more realistic images without washing everything out with the flash. These features really put a lot on your creative plate and they beg to be experimented with. That said Fuji images had less digital noise than those taken by the 800.

I took some shots on my deck using candlelight and the shots were quite good although you really have to keep the camera very steady. In daylight and in simple Auto, the camera sings. It saves images very quickly and you'd hardly believe it's an 8MP camera until you enlarge the files on your computer. Colors were very accurate including foliage, cat fur and skin tones. Images were richly saturated and the prints I made (4x6 and 8x10) were top notch. The camera has a burst mode at the highest resolution and can save four shots at 1.3 frames per second without the camera choking. Very impressive. It will do 10 shots in burst but quality drops off. The flash is also impressive, reaching out almost 20 feet. I did notice some focus grabbing in non-contrasty scenes as the camera tried to lock in. This is directly attributable to the lack of an AF Assist beam. Olympus engineers should really include one in the Stylus 1000 (if ever a 10-megapixel edition arrives).

The Stylus 800 also has an anti-shake setting on the mode dial but resolution drops 2048 x 1536 pixels, a huge drop to 3MP versus eight at the highest resolution. When you select the Image Blur Reduction mode on the 800's mode dial Bright Capture boosts the ISO sensitivity to a whopping 2,250 so that the shutter speed stays above 1/15^th of a second in order to eliminate blur. You'd use this in non mission critical situations but still a low-res steady shot is better than a blurry high-quality snapshot.

The camera has a movie mode (640 x 480 pixels at 30 fps) but the sound is mono and the optical zoom is disabled. Results are acceptable but as we've said before, digicams are no replacement for MiniDV camcorders.

The Olympus Master V1.2 software supplied with camera is adequate at best. You can do some basic edits, cropping and color correction. However, it makes handling loads of images very easy. It's a good start but if you feel editing will get in your blood, spring for a version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0.

Image Courtesy of Olympus America