Olympus Stylus TOUGH-6010 reviews

Olympus Stylus TOUGH-6010

Overall rating:

- 3.5

You can find here the most interesting reviews / ratings from the well-known expert sites about the Olympus Stylus TOUGH-6010 Camera. Here are the reviewers:

PhotographyBLOG	- 27 January 2010 -		- 3.5
DPInterface	- 25 August 2009 -		- 0

“ So, if you're in the market for an all weather camera you can basically mistreat and not have to worry unduly about the consequences, should you buy the Olympus Mju Tough 6010 over strengthened rivals from the other big names?

In its favour the Tough 6010 is one of the better looking options out there when compared to Canon's similarly featured, all singing all dancing D10 - even if for us the Canon takes marginally better pictures - but expensive compared to Pentax WS80 if all you want is waterproofing. We prefer the overall look and feel of Panasonic's toughened FT1, which only fails to match the Mju on its lack of freezeproofing.

As we've found with recent generations of the Mju series, certainly performance at ISO 400 and above is a let down - as are the rather cool, slightly washed out results delivered when shooting on the camera's standard default settings. On the plus side the Mju Tough 6010 is for the most part responsive and intuitive to use, and shouldn't tax its target audience of happy snappers, harassed families wanting a destruction proof compact for the annual holiday, plus more adventurous types such as snowboarders, divers and all weather photographers. All for whom, fortunately for Olympus, overall image quality may well come second in importance to being able to capture any image at all... ”

PhotographyBLOG's rating:

- 3.5

Complete review here

“ Take the Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 from earlier this year, throw in a 12 megapixel sensor, Magic Filters and (presumably) tweak its circuitry, and you’ll get the Olympus Stylus Tough 6010 over here. The Stylus Tough 6010 is an in-between model positioned in the middle of the Stylus Tough 6000 and 8000 models introduced earlier this year.

The Olympus Stylus Tough 6010 inherits all the goodies and features (sans smile detection) from its 10 megapixel sibling. Those features include Tap Control, built-in help screens, plenty of automatic shooting features and playback tools. The camera itself is shockproof, waterproof and freezeproof, and comes with a nicely viewable 2.7 inch screen and handy LED illuminator lamp.

The only new thing in the camera’s feature set is the inclusion of Magic Filters – you can choose from four different effects to use on your photos in shooting mode. As I mentioned in the dedicated section about Magic Filters, implementation wasn’t great as you’ll have to press a lot of buttons if you happen to change your mind about camera settings.

Oh, and speaking of buttons, the Stylus Tough 6010 also has the same, below average ergonomics of the Stylus 6000 (small buttons on the back), along with the lack of manual controls and memory card type restriction if you want to record VGA movies at 30 FPS.

Somehow, Olympus did something to the camera’s processing, and I’m happy to report the Stylus Tough 6010’s performance is better than the Stylus 6000 (surprising, since it needs to handle larger files) and closer to that of the Stylus 8000. That said, the camera’s performance isn’t quite ‘best in class’ or mind-blowing yet.

Image quality just touched the ‘good’ mark here – the camera produced marginally cleaner looking pictures compared to the Stylus 6000, but at the expense of increased noise reduction and worse image sharpness. I was quite put off by the softness, even in the center, when viewing photos at 100% but image quality should be fine for anyone producing 8 x 10 or smaller prints. So the Stylus Tough 6010 actually managed to up its megapixel count while boosting speed slightly and maintaining image quality (somewhat) – not bad I must say, not bad at all.

Bottom line is, the Olympus Stylus Tough 6010 is a decent camera that I can recommend to those wanting a rugged camera which produces acceptable image quality. It might not be the best camera in the world, but if you stick to taking pictures in decent to well lit places and try not to print posters with the camera, you should be one satisfied person... ”