Roundup: Compact Digital Cameras : Olympus StylusTough 6000
25. Olympus StylusTough 6000
Intelligent Automatic Mode
Like the most other camera manufacturers, Olympus now includes an 'Intelligent Auto' mode, which can recognize five different scene types (portait, night time, landscape, sport and macro) and adjust settings accordingly.
Olympus, though, has a lot of work to do in this area, with some scenes proving easier for the Intelligent Auto mode than others.
Olympus' new range of "Tough" cameras are designed to be solid and robust--'do not handle with care,' as their ad puts it. The Stylus Tough 6000 is designed to be able resist falls from heights of up to 5 feet, temperatures as low as -10 °C and stay waterproof to depths of 9 feet. The statistics are impressive, but other manufacturers are also launching all-terrain digital cameras. Can the Stylus 6000 keep up with the competition?
Handling
- Stylus Tough-6000...
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 Stylus 6000 is available in a range of bright colors including yellow and red, all of which can withstand a few tumbles and a cold snap.
The Stylus 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 Stylus 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 Stylus 6000 struggles with AutoFocus, so we had to use night mode, which led to a lot of interference. Unusually, the Stylus Tough 6000 (right) suffers from far fewer chromatic aberrations than the next model up, the Stylus Tough 8000 (left) despite the fact that they use the same lenses.
| Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 | |
|---|---|
| Pluses | Minuses |
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| Olympus' Stylus Tough 6000 is a very attractive product: stylish but robust at the same time and with good quality photos. All the same, it's a little slow for everyday use, and capping the video--which isn't even HD--at 10 seconds is a shame, but this is an all-terrain camera. |  |
should have classified the cameras to at least price and/or final rating. i got discouraged to read.
should have classified the cameras to at least price and/or final rating. i got discouraged to read.
When you say classified, what do you mean? Do you mean the pages should go in order of price, or in order of rating? Such as the cheap ones at the beginning and the expensive ones at the end OR the best cameras at the top and the worst cameras at the bottom?
i meant group them by chosen price ranges/brackets or any feature you think is relevant since comparison between cameras is just difficult with the present format wherein it is only possible to compare models of a certain brand.
It would have been nice if all the cameras were given scores (yes I know this is very subjective, but so are all the comments and pro/con sections). Idealy they would be given su scores as well (i.e. a still picture score, a video score, a asthetics score, a usablity score, maybe some others) and then the cameras could be sorted by those scores with links, maybey a short blurb at each camera in the sorted list. Another thing that would be very usefull to myself and I assume other readers is a features table that allows us to compare all the cameras.