Olympus u [mju:] 770 SW review

There aren't many waterproof compact cameras out there, let alone ones made to survive drops of up to 1.5m. Olympus designed its 7.1-megapixel mju 770 SW to do just that, providing real competition for Pentax's waterproof Optio W30.

By its tough nature alone, this Olympus makes an ideal choice if you routinely shoot in adverse conditions. We took it skiing with us as part of this review and it fared better than we did on a couple of falls. In fact, despite three days of chilly temperatures and a lot of bumps, the mju 770 SW still came out shooting.

Design
Obviously a lot of credit should be given to this camera's solid construction. The 770 SW weighs about 156g with its battery and xD-Picture Card installed and measures 91mm by 58mm by 20mm. It packs a 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD, 3x optical, 38mm- to 114mm-equivalent f/3.5 to f/5.0 zoom lens and a small 7.1-megapixel (effective) CCD sensor into its metal body.

The camera's small buttons were a bit difficult to press with heavy snow gloves on, but we did manage to snap off a few pictures in auto mode before removing our gloves.

Features
Like so many compact cameras, Olympus doesn't include manual exposure controls in the 770 SW. To make up for that, the company includes auto and program modes, as well as 24 preset scene modes, so you can let the camera decide what to do based on the shooting conditions.

Unfortunately, activating a scene mode requires two presses of a button on the camera back before you even get a chance to select the mode you want. This became somewhat frustrating over the course of three days skiing. Plus, since the movie mode is buried among the scene modes, you'll have to go through the same process if you want to capture a video clip. We'd prefer the option of letting the camera default to the scene mode you last used at start-up, or better still, a dedicated scene mode button to jump into the last scene mode you used.

Olympus' graphically driven menu system is intuitive. Plus, commonly used functions, such as white balance and sensitivity, can be quickly changed by using the function/OK button found in the middle of the four-way rocker on the camera back.

Performance
The mju 770 SW performed somewhat slowly in our tests. It took 2.1 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG. Subsequent images took 2.4 seconds between shots with the flash turned off, jumping to 3.2 seconds between shots with the flash turned on.

Shutter lag fared slightly better, measuring 0.6 seconds in our high-contrast test, but falling to 2 seconds in our low-contrast test. Continuous shooting mode yielded 1.1 frames per second (fps) when capturing VGA-sized JPEGs and 1.4fps when capturing 7.1-megapixel JPEGs.