With its new Mju 9000, Olympus is making a rather late entry into the race to beat the Panasonic TZ7 that just about every other manufacturer has joined, with the notable exception of Nikon.

With a 28 mm wide-angle 10x optical zoom, mechanical image stabilisation, a 3'' LCD screen and intelligent scene recognition, the Mju 9000 is Olympus' attempt to make a name for itself in the field of super-zoom compact digital cameras.

Handling

Our first impressions of the Mju 9000 left us reassured: this is a solid little compact that feels trustworthy.  The downside is that it's relatively heavy at 200 g and feels quite bulky.  The design isn't unattractive as such, but it's unlikely to seduce anybody, either.  Getting used to the camera isn't all that easy, with the (very) small scroll wheel and the touchpad tricky to use.  The slider that controls the zoom is ridiculously tiny, especially on a camera whose main strength is its powerful 10x zoom.  The control itself is fast enough when you use it, but could be more accurate.  The LCD screen enjoys rather wide viewing angles, but we would have liked a higher resolution and more fluid movements at low light levels.  In bright sunlight, it does better than some other cameras, but still suffers with a glossy screen.


The Mju 9000 isn't a particularly fast camera, and you'll need to wait around 2.5 seconds to switch it on, and the same amount of time in between two consecutive photos.  In burst mode, the 9000 takes one photo per second at its maximum resolution, and can get up to 5 fps at a lower resolution (3 Mpix).

Image Quality

The photos produced by the Mju 9000 were generally pretty satisfactory.  Inside, the white balance was slightly dominated by warm shades (red).  The handling of electronic noise is pretty traditional with blurriness from 200 ISO, but most noise under control up until 400 ISO.  The image stabilisation system works well and you can get sharp shots at 1/8 s without a tripod.

The images are sharp overall, even if the centre of the frame has more detail than the edges.  We found some very light tinges of purple fringing, but on an A4 print at the lowest sensitivity was in no way problematic.  At 1600 ISO, the highest sensitivity, A4 prints still have plenty of detail, but there's a lot of blurriness and grain.


The flash produces reasonable results with a decent amount of light and the super macro mode allows you to focus on objects just a centimetre away.  Unfortunately, however, while most cameras now have HD video, the Mju 9000 has stuck with 640 x 480 pixels for recording.  The quality is only just about acceptable and the optical zoom is not available while recording video.