A nice point-and-shoot.

Author's Rating:

Pros: 3x optical zoom, weather resistant

Cons: battery hog, no optical viewfinder

The Bottom Line: 
While it has its flaws, the Stylus 810 is a good pocket point-and-shoot with some nice features.

Author's Review
I'm an Olympus fan. I've owned Olympus cameras since 1993, and many of my cameras are still working. Unfortunately, my D-60 is not among those numbers, after my daughter got ahold of it. Since I already had a few xD cards and liked the brand, I figured I would replace it with another Olympus. Costco had the Olympus Stylus 810, with eight megapixels, for a good price.

The Stylus 810 is a pocket camera, and a surprisingly rugged one. It's made of stainless steel and very slim with the lens closed (2.2 H x 3.8 W x 0.9 D). The Stylus 810 is billed as water resistant. That doesn't mean it's submersible, but it can stand up to some rain with no problem. Given the expense of a good digital camera, this is a point in its favor. It has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and comes with a charger for it. The battery is the same as the one that came in my D-60.


And I'm very glad for that, because the Stylus 810 is also a big battery hog. Battery life in use is up to the task. However, the Stylus 810 drains when you're not using it much more than cameras that run off standard batteries. Let's say you use the camera to take some Thanksgiving pictures, then put the camera aside. Christmas comes around, and you take the camera out to get those Christmas pictures, as I did. The battery was able to squeeze off about fifteen shots before shutting down. Fortunately, I had the other battery with me. Now I try to keep one charged at all times and switch them when needed.

The controls are easy to operate. Unsurprisingly, most of them are located on the right, for right-handed people. It has a separate power button located near the shutter (but far enough away that you won't press it accidentally.) The controls are complex but not too hard to pick up.

While you cannot adjust the camera manually to your liking (F-stop, shutter speed, etc), the Stylus 810 offers a staggering amount of modes. Many cameras offer a 'sport mode' which used a higher shutter speed, for example. The Stylus 810 offers the following:

-Snow, Beach, Candle, Indoor, Museum, Sunset, Auction, Cuisine, Documents, Fireworks, Landscape, Night scene, Sports mode, Behind glass, Portrait mode, Self-portrait, Night portrait, Panorama assist, Shoot & select 1, Shoot & select 2, Landscape-portrait, Available light portrait.

Seems like a lot, right? That's how it seems when you're using it, too. Clearly, Olympus intended this to be used by a non-expert, but the sheer amount of choices may well stagger a non-expert. At a restaurant, should you use 'Cuisine', or 'Indoor'? Some of them are pretty obvious (Behind Glass). Most users will probably stick to a few shooting modes or keep it in full automatic mode. Shoot and Select shoots several pictures in rapid succession, and you pick the ones you like best.

Honestly, this camera would have been better if they'd trimmed the choices down a bit and given the user the ability to manually set f-stop and shutter speed to their liking.

The camera also offers great options in low light. It does this by what Olympus calls Bright Capture technology. In a nutshell, it shoots at a very high ISO (1000 or 3200), and it uses clusters of pixels to capture images. This creates bigger pixels, which can capture more light. Pictures taken in these conditions are rather noisy, but acceptable. (And better than dark and blurry pictures.)

The Stylus 810 comes with a 3x optical zoom. This goes from 35-105 mm -- it's a lot of zoom. It can expand this to 5x digitally, with some image degradation. But it's more than enough for snapshots, and more than a lot of its competitors have.

It can capture video in either 640x480 or 320x240. It also has a built-in microphone to capture sound. Videos are in QuickTime format. The video quality is generally okay; you won't be shooting your own Blair Witch Project with this, but it's up to the task of taking simple videos (birthday parties, etc.)

The Stylus 810 uses the Olympus standard xD card. It also has 28 MB of built-in memory. This is a nice feature; in case you forget your memory card, you're not completely stuck. High resolution pictures with the 810 will exhaust the internal memory very quickly, though.

The flash is rated for seventeen feet, and it easily meets that. It does the job fine for a point-and-shoot. It has red-eye reduction, but flash-based red-eye reduction (having the flash flicker a few times before actually firing off) doesn't work very well. That's not a knock against this camera -- I've owned a few cameras with red-eye reduction, and none of them have ever been good.


The LCD is very large -- 2.5 inches. While it does a great job of displaying pictures, it tends to wash out in bright sunlight. This is a problem because the Stylus has no optical viewfinder. As a pocket camera, the Stylus is engineered for size, but it's too bad Olympus couldn't find a way to squeeze it on there.

Image quality is generally good, and I have shots in low light that other cameras would not have been able to take (at least pocket, point-and-shoot cameras.) Pictures are clear and sharp. Some pictures come out grainy on the screen but much better in print. The camera has some on-board editing capabilities, including the ability to fix red-eye right on board. This works well and is useful to have. Unfortunately, this is the first Olympus camera I have owned that does NOT have a remote control. There is a self-timer, though.

Connecting the camera to your PC is relatively simple: it has a USB connection and is recognized as a removable drive, like most cameras. The USB cable is not the standard A/mini-B connection, which is annoying. If you misplace the cable, it's off to Olympus for a replacement. There are also video cables that connect to standard RCA jacks (red, yellow, white) for playing video.

In general, the Stylus 810 is a good choice for a pocket, point-and-shoot camera. It offers a lot of modes, perhaps too many. It's got a wide zoom range, it fits in a shirt pocket, and it's weather resistant. The average user will be happy with it, as will someone who shoots a lot of low-light photography. Photo diehards will likely want manual control and may not be as pleased. But as a pocket point-and-shoot, the Stylus is a good choice.


Tech specs:


* Sensor resolution
* 8 megapixels

* Optical sensor type
* CCD

* Effective sensor resolution
* 8,000,000 pixels


* Light sensitivity
* ISO 64, ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400, ISO 800, ISO 1600, ISO 3200, ISO auto


* Special effects
* Sepia, Black & White

* Max shutter speed
* 1/1000 sec

* Digital video format
* QuickTime

* Still image format
* JPEG

* Video capture
* QuickTime - 640 x 480 -, QuickTime - 320 x 240 -, QuickTime - 160 x 120 -


Lens Systems


* Equivalent 35mm focal length
* 35 - 105 mm

Camera Flash

* Flash modes
* Auto mode, Fill-in mode, Backlight mode, Flash OFF mode, Red-eye reduction

Display

* Type
* LCD display - TFT active matrix - 2.5 in - Color

* Resolution
* 230,000 pixels