Olympus mju 790 SW review

This is where the LED light comes into its own, as it means you can illuminate your subject in continuous mode, which is usually impossible because of the time a flash takes to recycle.

Colours are a little undersaturated, but skin tone reproduces well. Portrait mode softens images slightly, but this is only really noticable when viewing on a monitor rather than in prints. There were some traces of purple fringing, but again this was more apparent on screen than in prints.

As always on compacts, the maximum ISO setting of 1,600 is essentially unusable, with noise pebbledashing the images. It seems slightly pointless to include such high settings on compacts when the processor can't deal with the resultant noise. At other settings, the 790 deals with noise reasonably well. ISO 800 shows noise in darker shades, while ISO 200 and 100 give decent quality images. Detail is, as always, sharpest and most free of noise at the lowest setting, ISO 80.

The price of the non-extending lens is some barrel distortion at the wide angle. This means that parallel lines, such as in brickwork, converge slightly at the edges of the image. However, detail does not soften at the boundaries and the distortion is barely noticeable.

Conclusion
The Olympus mju 790 SW may trumpet its tough, waterproof and shockproof characteristics, but it's a more than capable compact on dry land. Respectable image quality and a number of helpful features set it apart from similarly specced 7-megapixel cameras with 3x zooms and 64mm screens, even before the robustness comes in handy.

It may still be too pricey for those of us who never go near the deep end of the pool, but it looks stylish enough and is sturdy enough to justify the expense.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide