Olympus had become the specialist of waterproof cameras over the years. The SW series can take photos under water, up to 3 meters, and even up to 10 m for the µ850 SW. The Mju 1050 SW claims to be shock-proof to 1.5m, water-proof to 3m and freeze-proof to -10°C. It is the last of the series that will be replaced by this year by the µ Tough – a name that is certainly more revealing.

Handling

The µ1050 SW is all metal body and shockproof casing and for that very reason is rather heavy. A sliding panel protects the lens. Sliding it up puts the camera on, therefore the « power » button seems a bit redundant. What’s more, the « slider » tends to open when at the bottom of your bag…The resolution of the 2.7” LCD display is correct. It is however very shiny and therefore hard to use on a sunny day. There is an interesting tap control feature. If you tap lightly on the sides of the screen, you can trigger some operations such as picture playback or set the flash mode.. A pure gimmick ? Well think again. Try using a compact camera with skiing gloves and you might quickly change your mind. This is indeed an innovation we would welcome on all cameras meant to work in extreme temperatures , well at least at -10 °C...




Patience was required during our test from moment we put the camera on. The sense of slowness will stay with you all along. The Olympus Mju 1050 SW feels a little sluggish while focusing in low light and also when storing images. This again causes an unfortunate delay between consecutive shots. Burst mode at high speed seems at first excellent, with7 frames per second on more than 15 frames. Things look down from then on
because the µ1050 SW has to stop during the next 15 seconds, while it stores everything on the card. Speaking of which, it is worth underlining that Olympus holds hard onto its xD cards, both expensive and with a capacity limited to 2 GB. The µ1050 SW will accept a micro-SD in an adaptor but some of the functions will be restricted: video is limited to 10 seconds for example.

Picture quality

The periscope lens of the µ1050 SW is average: you will catch the details in the middle, while the edges are more blurry. The quality of the whole is satisfying for prints. In terms of sensitivity levels, results at 800 ISO are not as good as those we have seen with models by Fujifilm, Canon or Panasonic for example.




Colours are fine and white balancing is good outdoors and warms in artificial light.