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Olympus µ1010 compact camera

Silly name aside, this is a quality camera

What you need to know about cloud backup

Review The curiously named Olympus µ1010 is also known as the mju 1010, which doesn’t make it any easier to pronounce. It comes in three groovy - or garish - colours, silver, black and metallic blue.

This is a pretty well-specified camera considering the price and target audience. There’s a beefy 7x 6.6-46.2mm optical zoom lens for starters, which is equivalent to a 37-260mm zoom on a 35mm camera.

Olympus µ1010 compact camera

Olympus' µ1010: it even works underwater

The 1/2.33in CCD is a 10.1-megapixel chip, and you also get a twin image stabilisation system, face detection, special technology designed for low-light shooting and 23 scene modes. You can even use the µ1010 underwater, up to a depth of 40m, provided you’ve got an optional underwater case. And a good pair of lungs.

The µ1010 is a slim camera, measuring 99 x 56 x 25mm and weighing 135g without battery. It’s certainly very pocketable. At the front is the usual flash and lens arrangement, while on top is the shutter control and power button - which glows a nice blue colour when switched on. At the side is a flap for a mini USB port, while around the back is 2.7in LCD screen composed of 230,000 pixels. Nearby sits a zoom rocker bar, control dial for various modes, the menu button, a playback button and a four-way arrow pad for controlling macro, flash, timer and exposure compensation.

Below this is a display button and shadow adjust/delete button. Underneath is a spring-loaded cover for the battery and memory card. Incidentally, rather than use an SD card or Memory Stick, the µ1010 uses the xD-Picture card format.

Cloud based data management

Latest Comments

Oly CPUs

My first digital SLR (not interchangeable lens) was the Oly 1400L. It had a Sparc processor and was running an embedded version of SunOS. As an oldtime kernel hacker I really liked that and really liked that the embedded timestamp was in UNIX epoch (secs since 8AM 01/01/1970) format. Wonder what they are using now.

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Olympus digital cameras are one of the easiest cameras to use I've come across

I like olympus camera's for their simplicity, good value and good quality pics, oh and pretty robust too. I've had a few now and my next one will be olympus too, glad to see they've stuck with keeping the UI simple :)

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Should have reviewed the u1030SW...much more interesting camera..

and the problem with your memory cards is that there are FOUR types of xD cards:

- standard grade, which are slow and have no extra functions enabled

- Type M : which are faster and enable panorama features (even Fuji's cards work if Type M I believe)

- Type H : High-speed, for faster shot to shot, and panorama (rare to find, and expensive)

- Type M+ : coming out in the next month, will enable high-res video recording without the current 10second max record time, until card memory runs out.

I suspect you had a cheap standard grade card, which has been outdated for at least two years. Anyone with a recent Oly wants a Type M or M+ to get access to the features.

The Oly 1030SW is the camera you should have reviewed though - a 28mm wide-angle lens with internal 3.8x optical zoom, shockproof, waterproof, and same sensor. A much more interesting and unique camera...

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