Traditionally a leading manufacturer of waterproof digital cameras, Olympus has updated its selection of all-terrain cameras, adding the 'Tough' collection at the beginning of 2009.  The top-of-the-range Mju Tough 8000 is certainly solid: it can go underwater to depths of 10 m, fall from a height of 2 m, withstand the cold up to -10 °C and resist being crushed by a weight of up to 100 kg.  That's all well and good, but it remains to be seen whether or not it's still a good buy at a time when other manufacturers like Fujiflm, Panasonic and Canon are working on tough compact cameras of their own.

Handling
The cameras in the new Mju Tough range all have a similar well designed flat frame.  They are impeccably put together, and the metal exterior contributes to the impression that these are solid cameras.  A raised part at the front of the camera on the right hand side makes handling it much easier than on the earlier model, the Mju 1050 SW, which slipped out your hands very easily .  The lens is now protected by an automatic cover, which means that you no longer run the risk of having it slip open at the bottom of your bag or in your pocket.

Olympus has kept the controls largely the same, and there are no big surprises.  While the Mju Tough 8000 is much faster than the model it replaces, it still struggles to keep up with the most powerful 'regular' digital cameras, with the delay between saving one photo and being able to take the next particularly long. 

Other features have been improved though, including the addition of a 28 mm wide-angle lens, which makes this camera a lot more useful than its predecessors.  There's also a new intelligent automatic mode, a feature now found on almost all of Panasonic's cameras but less frequently with other manufacturers.  The version included here is nowhere near as powerful as on a camera like the Panasonic FS7.  It can generally identify the correct scene mode,  but it sometimes takes a very long time.  It doesn't get it right every time, either: at night, for example, it often defaults to 'night portrait', which involves turning on the flash, even when shooting a landscape.

The real problem is that the intelligent auto mode doesn't allow any manual settings at all.  On a Panasonic camera, you can ask the iA mode only to choose from scene modes that don't use the flash.  Here, with things 100% automatic, you need to switch back to manual mode to make any changes at all.

Image Quality
Is a 12 Megapixel sensor that much more demanding?  Or did we just get unlucky with a duff camera?  Either way, the Mju Tough 8000 that we tested consistently gave worse results than the Mju Tough 6000, despite having the same lens.  The image stabilization didn't really do its job, and the only way to get a sharp portrait was to set the exposure time to just 1/15s, requiring a speed of 1600 ISO. 


There are no innovations in noise handling, with graininess visible from 400 ISO, and very noticeable beyond that.  Moreover, the focus never quite seems perfect, even in the centre of the frame.  The sensor's dynamic range is also limited, with bright areas lost too easily.  Chromatic aberration gets special mention: in this 100% reproduction of an A4 print the problems are all too obvious.

Olympus still lags behind with video, with no resolution above 640 x 480 available, and clips are, infuriatingly, limited to ten seconds, unless you're using an xD card. 

Another irritating anachronism is the lack of an auto-rotate for your photos ... hasn't Olympus realized that some people want to take portraits?