Review: Olympus Mju 700

Olympus [mju:] 700 | sample images 1 2 3 4 5 6

Product Details Details at a glance Megapixels: 5.1 Optical Zoom: 3x Digital Zoom: 5.7x LCD: 2.5 inches Storage: xD We clicked with DDesign and build quality, weather proof body, guide mode Shots in the dark Struggles in low light, screen can be hard to see when it's sunny, occasional odd decisions in auto Links More Olympus information www.olympus.co.uk Price Comparison: Olympus Mju 700

Inside the funky wedge design of the Mju 700 you'll find 7 million pixels and a bright user friendly menu system. There's also an anti shake system, a whole bunch of scene modes and it's weather proof too. We took one out on test to see how it stacked up against the competition.

Features
One of the first things to mention about the Mju 700 is that it takes xD cards rather than the more common SD cards. This is an even smaller card that the SD and is really only used by Olympus and Fuji. If you're trading up from an older camera then it's possible that your existing cards won't fit but then given the lurch in megapixels lately you might be as well buying a new higher capacity card anyway. There's a built in memory that allows you to store 5 pictures at “super high quality” but as with most cameras you'll want to budget for a 512MB or larger card. These cost a couple of pounds more than SD but one of the internet suppliers should be able to sort you out for less than 20 quid.

All weather body
OK, I'm going to put this in big letters so nobody gets the wrong idea. THE MJU 700 IS NOT WATERPROOF it is weather proof. To IEC standard 529 IPX4, apparently. I read the press release, flicked through the basic manual, searched the advanced manual (supplied on disk) and had a quick browse of the internet. Eventually I found a copy of the standard. Here's what Type 4X says “Enclosures are intended for indoor or outdoor use primarily to provide a degree of protection against corrosion, windblown dust and rain, splashing water and hose-directed water; undamaged by the formation of ice on the enclosure.” It was at this point that I decided against trying the Mju 700 in the shower.

It should stand up to changeable British weather and would probably take any soaking you felt comfortable staying out in but it's not waterproof. You can't take it swimming with you and the manual warns against washing it under a tap.

If you want a camera that should live up to a beach holiday without worrying too much about sand and the occasional splash of salty water then the Olympus Mju 700 could be for you.

BrightCapture technology
This is actually a pretty technical feature. I could bore you with the way it works (averaging sets of 9 pixels to produce super pixels and then expanding these via the TruePic algorithm) but I'll just stick to what it does. The Mju 700 has some fancy software that allows it to present you with a view on the screen that is up to four times brighter than a conventional screen. It is also used the enhance the picture and produce lower noise images when using a higher ISO. Check out the “on test” section fro how well it does this.

Super macro mode
This isn't a feature so much as something that really, really annoyed me on test. Normally on a compact camera you nudge the “macro” button when you want to get close to something. This allows the camera to focus closer than normal and is often limited in the zoom position you can use. Olympus have split the control into “macro” and super macro”. Macro gets you close and you can use the zoom, super macro gets you closer but locks the zoom at its widest position.

The reason this is annoying is that to enter macro mode takes 3 button presses (macro, scroll down to “normal” macro, enter) rather than 1. Worse still, if you leave the camera in super macro the camera can't focus at “normal” distances. It takes 4 button presses to exit super macro.

Scene modes
Normally I'd pass over these but the Mju 700 has a couple of interesting ones. There are three settings for underwater use. You need a housing to make full use of these but they should make up for some of the loss of red light when you take pictures underwater. There's a regular underwater, a super wide and an underwater macro mode.

Guide
Not a feature so much as a really cool idea - a photo guide on the camera. Rotate the mode dial to “guide” and then select what you want to do. For example, if you choose “reducing blur” then you get two options. You can either set to “shaky hand” mode or set ISO to a high value. This is a great way of learning your way round the camera - just select your problem and the camera will help you through it.

Handling
It's a case of love it or hate it whenever a manufacturer breaks from the “thin square box” mould. The Olympus Mju 700 has an attractive wedge shape that is easy to grip and easy to slip in your pocket. This shape makes it very hard to hold your camera with two hands - even if you try to then your left hand slips off quite easily. If you are using it in a high risk environment (such as over the side of a boat) then I'd highly recommend wrapping the supplied strap around your wrist.

Buttons are laid out in a pretty familiar fashion with a four way rocker surrounded by various “helper” buttons. It's nice to see a compact camera where exposure compensation is easy to access from the main shooting mode. You simply need to press the up button and then use left and right to dial in plus and minus compensation. The only button I struggled with was the power button - it's tiny and quite a long stretch from the normal holding position.

The flash is sensibly located right in front of the shutter button - on a tiny camera it seems that this is the place that it is least likely to get blocked by your finger.

Menus are very pretty though maybe no the easiest to follow. I'm not sure why pressing “menu” when in standard shooting mode offers me the option to select various scenes - when it is greyed out and can only really be used in scene mode.

Image quality
At its best, image quality from the Olympus Mju 700 is very good. It can be on a par with some of the best 7MP compacts that are around at the moment. At its worst it really isn't great. One problem I had was that it wasn't always easy to tell whether you were going to get a great shot or just a so-so one. A couple of times I expected it to deliver a really beautiful image only to b disappointed. On others I was very surprised at how well it coped with challenging conditions.

Two areas I found that it doesn't like very much are dark conditions and strong edge contrasts.

In the dark the camera fares quite badly. Leave it on auto everything and it is highly likely to pick 1/4s at ISO 64 which if you are handholding will be blurred even if you remember to enter image stabilised mode. Turn the ISO up to the very generous 1,600 and you'll get a much more manageable 1/125s or so. You'll also get a very noisy image. This isn't really unexpected - very few compacts can shoot acceptable pictures at ISO 1600 but the camera could compromise on 1/60 at ISO800 which would give a sharpish lowish noise picture.

Give the Mju 700 a high contrast area (such as leaves against the sky) and you'll see plenty of chromatic aberration. This used to be a very common problem and shows itself as a pinkish shift at the boundary from dark to light. Most cameras we have tested recently have overcome this with exotic lens coatings and clever software but the Mju 700 suffers from it more than most.

The camera seems slightly biased towards over exposure (maybe half a stop) and many advanced users will find themselves reaching for the exposure compensation to dial in -0.3 or -0.7 in lots of scenes where you'd expect the camera to cope by itself.

As you'd expect noise is very visible at ISO 1600. I'd class pictures taken at ISO 1600 as being pretty well unusable. Those taken at 800 will give acceptable 6X4s though and if this is as large as you want to print there's not a great noise issue. Of course even at ISO 64 a badly exposed image will show noise but up to ISO 400 I was generally comfortable with the amount of noise in the images. The Mju 700 isn't the best camera for handling noise but it's a long way from the worst.

Shooting
The Olympus Mju 700 takes a just under 3 seconds to power up which is about average for its class. Shot to shot time is rather sluggish - 10 shots took 22 seconds in “normal” shooting mode which is a little less than 0.5 fps. That's pressing the button, releasing and pressing again. Shutter lag was noticeable but was mainly the camera refocusing even though I took care to keep it still so it really didn't need to refocus.

For some reason formatting a card took a long time. I was shooting with a Fujifilm 1GB xD “H” card. Formatting it took well over 30 seconds. This may be because the format of an xD card is rather more thorough than the format most cameras do on an SD or CF card. If you accidentally format an xD card you are much less likely to be able to recover the files than with another type of card.

What's not to like
The implementation of image stabilisation is slightly illogical - it's a separate option on the control wheel. This means that you could be in normal shooting, scene mode or image stabilised mode. This is particularly frustrating if you are in macro mode and realise that there is a risk of blur. You must exit normal shooting, go into image stabilised mode and then reselect macro mode. It's worse with the scene modes - I couldn't find a way to combine a scene mode with image stabilisation, which means that either the scene modes or image stabilisation won't be used by most users. That's a shame and I can only presume that the decision to make it hard to access image stabilisation is because it uses up the battery much faster than the other modes.

Battery life seems fine (over 300 shots on a charge) but the battery went from “everything fine” to “about to die” within the space of a couple of shots. If you were shooting a lot in a day then you could easily get caught out by this.

Despite the BrightCapture technology the screen was quite hard to read on a bright day. It may be up to 4 times brighter than a standard screen but it's not a match for the very best screens around.

Our Verdict

The Olympus Mju 700is a very pretty camera and is likely to have a solid following. It is small enough to take anywhere and the 7MP can deliver some really great pictures. However, it's also a slightly hit and miss camera. As I mentioned in the on test section it was sometimes hard to guess what it would make of a scene. Despite having a clear layout and some great touches such as the guide mode, I found the camera a little hard to get to grips with. The image stabilisation would really be better if you could turn it on with just a button rather than entering a special mode though it's great to see exposure compensation in an easy to access place. Combine this with the live histogram and you should get great exposures.

Camera specification

Mega-pixels:	7.1	Photo:	JPEG, RAW
Optical Z:	3x	RAW:	Yes
Digital Z:	5x	Aperture:	f/3.4-5.7
LCD:	2.5 inch	Focal L:	equiv. 37-111mm
Dimensions:	94.8 x 55.9 x 20.4	Shutter:	4 sec to 1/1000
Weight:	103g	Exposure:	ISO 64 to 1600
Storage:	xD	Movie:	640x480@15fps
Internal:	19.1	Battery:	Li-ion Li-42B
Interface:	USB 2.0, AV	PictBridge:	Yes