Olympus' new range of 'Tough' cameras are designed to be solid and robust--'do not handle with care,' as their ad puts it.  The Mju Tough 6000 is designed to be able resist falls from heights of up to 1.5 m, temperatures as low as -10 °C and stay waterproof to depths of 3 metres.  The statistics are impressive, but other manufacturers are also launching all-terrain digital cameras. Can the Mju 6000 keep up with the competition?

Handling
The metallic case includes a periscopic zoom, the mechanism for which is entirely hidden inside.  The controls are exactly what you'd expect, with a scroll wheel to change between modes, and shortcuts to give direct access to certain features like macro mode or flash activation.  Handling is easy and intuitive.  As with other Olympus cameras, the Mju 6000 is available in a range of bright colours including yellow and red, all of which can withstand a few tumbles and a cold snap. 

The Mju 6000 might be tough enough for you to take almost anywhere, but it doesn't move particularly fast.  It takes 3.55 seconds to power up, which is certainly long enough to make anyone impatient.  The time between saving one photo to the memory card and being able to take the next is a very long 5.5 seconds.  Burst mode runs at 0.6 fps in the default resolution and 5.3 fps if you turn it down to 3 Megapixels.


Image Quality
Overall, photos taken on the Mju 6000 are satisfactory but not excellent.  There is plenty of detail right across the frame, despite the fact that the white balance is a little too dominated by red tones, especially inside under artificial light.  As well as a wide-angle lens, the camera features image stabilization, which meant that we could manage our portrait test shot at 400 ISO with 1/5th second exposure time.

The electronic noise handling doesn't show any advances, with graininess at 400 ISO, but there is still blurriness before that.


In low light, the Mju 6000 struggles with AutoFocus, so we had to use night mode, which led to a lot of interference.  Unusually, the Mju Tough 6000 (right) suffers from far fewer chromatic aberrations than the next model up, the Tough 8000 (left) despite the fact that they use the same lenses.

The macro mode is ok, but the amount of detail without image stabilization is disappointing.