Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat adventure camera
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2022
I bought this as a new everyday-carry camera after finally getting sick of the pointless madness of smartphone cameras. It's worth it, if you ask me.
Good stuff:
- Decent picture quality in daylight, but likely outperformed by a fancy phone.
- Outstanding picture quality at night, way beyond what any phone I've seen can do.
- Decent optical zoom, though only a little bit of it.
- Easy to cram into a back pocket without worrying about damaging it. Nice build quality without being too excessively bulky.
- Starts up quickly; ready to go in about one second from pressing the power button. I really appreciate this, since one of my biggest frustrations with phone cameras is how they often take insane amounts of time just to start up.
- Takes RAW photos.
- Manual focus, which I was surprised to find because I was assured by the reviews I read that it did not have manual focus. It sure does, though, and it's surprisingly good. The super-macro setting is very impressive too.
- MicroUSB charging, which is less nice than USB-C, but much better than the terrible proprietary connector that the old models had.
- Impressive waterproofing. Unless you're a scuba diver, this is basically a true underwater camera (and if you are, I hear there's a deep-water housing available too). It's not like phones tend to be where they claim it's waterproof, but then specify in the fine print that it's only good to one meter of depth for half an hour or whatever - no, this is a camera you can actually take swimming with you.
Bad stuff:
- There doesn't seem to be any exposure bracketing function apart from the internal HDR scene mode, which is frustrating because the scene mode processing is terrible (see next point).
- Seems to have an extremely mediocre image processor, maybe not even any better than the one included in the earliest models in the Olympus Tough series. The JPEGs it produces are extremely crunchy (RAW is worth using for this reason), and the scene mode filters are kind of a joke. You can't capture RAWs when using them, and it only saves 3-MP photos despite this being a 12-MP camera (which is already a little on the low side compared to what phones are doing these days, especially for a camera that costs about the same as a decent phone). If you aren't planning on shooting RAWs all the time and doing all your processing afterwards, I really don't recommend this camera.
- Almost every preset mode locks out most of the manual controls, seemingly for no reason. For example, if you're using the candlelight mode, you're simply not allowed to use manual focus. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this, since the focus is entirely independent of anything candlelight mode is actually changing (exposure, aperture, and sensitivity, I guess), so this makes no sense. Also, every time the camera silently changes your settings like this, it doesn't change them back when you return to a mode where they're allowed again, making it an ongoing hassle to go through and put everything back how you want it. The frustration of this is quickly training me to never touch any of the scene modes or other presets. It's really aggravating to go out and take a bunch of photos, only to discover that none of them were saved as good-quality RAWs because the camera silently turned off RAW capture on me.
- Video files are limited to 4GB in size, even when using an exFAT SD card (so this is not a real technical limitation, just an arbitrary one imposed by lazy code). Worse still, they simply did not bother to add any way to make it automatically restart recording when hitting the file size limit (which would have been a trivial software modification that is already seen in other Olympus cameras), and if even that wasn't bad enough, there aren't even any low-resolution video format options that could squeeze more time out of the 4GB limit. The longest video you can record with this camera is 29 minutes long, period. All of the possible workarounds have been defeated, seemingy for no reason, and most formats are limited to even shorter durations (around 10 minutes for 1080p60, 5 minutes for 4k30, and just a few seconds for the high-speed modes). Despite the marketing suggesting otherwise, this is NOT a video camera. If you're buying this to record video, expect to be disappointed.
Overall, I'd say that this is a decent camera to use for basic indoor and outdoor photography, especially in low-light conditions. While it's hardly a proper DSLR, it has enough manual controls to at least not be a downgrade from smartphones in that regard, and it's a lot more likely to survive an exciting trip than either of those are. It's far from perfect, and the video limitations are a huge letdown, but I think I do still prefer it over a horribly busted smartphone camera.
