Review Olympus goes for another slice of the ultra-compact digital camera market with its new, wedge-shaped Mju 700, a weatherproof and very stylish high-resolution camera with plenty to shout about...

The 700's 7.1 megapixel sensor can create image files easily large enough and with enough detail for prints up to and over A3 in size, enough for the majority of snappers among you. Twenty-three scene modes provide a great range of auto-shooting presets such as (the more usual) Landscape, Portrait and Night Scene modes.

There are some more novel modes too, such as Text, Candle, Cuisine, Behind Glass and an Auction mode for those eBay sellers among its potential market. However, the presence of three underwater modes doesn't mean it can be submerged. The weatherproofing allows the 700 to withstand splash, but you'll need one of the accessory housings to take it beneath the waves.

Olympus' proprietary BrightCapture technology is a system that uses neat processing tricks to help improve snaps. The camera's computer looks at blocks of nine pixels, which are then all treated as "super pixels" and their values averaged out. In theory, this reduces noise and improves colours. However, the processing associated with it removed some of the detail from shots, I believe, and introduced some unwanted and unwelcome noise in shadow areas.

The 700 has a built in 19.1MB memory capacity and accepts xD Picture Cards of up to 1GB in capacity. The camera's lens is an F3.4-F5.7, 37-111mm (35mm equivalent) 3x optical zoom which works quite well - even if the maximum aperture is a little restricting - but does display barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom range and some odd corner softness.

Two metering modes, ESP (similar to a matrix set up) and spot, work wonderfully well, and I had nary a poor exposure, so top marks here. Plus, there's the usual run of white-balance presets and ISO settings that run up to 1600, while focusing is accomplished using Olympus' iESP TTL contrast detection AF system.

The small wedge-shaped body is attractive and lends itself to one-handed operation, but that can cause camera shake. However, as the 700 boasts an anti-shake mechanism this is less of a worry. I found the anti-shake system worked well - it's just a shame it's only available as a separate mode and not usable across all the camera's shooting settings.