Olympus Stylus 1000 Digital Camera Review
By Richard Baguley
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
December 11, 2006
The Olympus Stylus 1000 boasts an impressive 10-megapixel image sensor, a 3x zoom lens and an unusually wide ISO range of 64 to 6400. The impressive specs don’t necessarily match the image quality of the resulting photos, though. The Stylus 1000, which sells for about $315 online, has some positive aspects but some major limitations too.
The Stylus 1000's expansive ISO range is just one of many unusual characteristics; it also sports a curious wedge-like design where the right side of the camera (looking from the back) is much deeper than the left. Although the lens on the right side balances it out somewhat, the right side of the camera is much heavier than the left. While this is comfortable when held in the hand, it’s a pain to use on a tripod. The tripod socket is placed on the left side, which is lighter and causes the camera to tip when secured to a tripod. It will be difficult to level and balance properly.
The controls are well placed. The zoom is under the thumb and the shutter is under the index finger. Like most cameras, you need two hands to use the numerous controls on the back of the camera, including the mode dial just below the zoom control. The on-screen menus are rather poorly designed, with the options randomly placed in the menu. The 2.5-inch LCD screen has 230,000 pixels, and its images look clean and sharp. The monitor has Olympus’ Bright Capture technology, which brightens the LCD screen to give a better indication of what the image will look like. It works surprisingly well.
The Stylus 1000’s images are disappointing, though, with inaccurate colors and obvious noise in many of them. Although the colors were loosely related to the originals, they didn’t bear a close resemblance, with blues and greens differing drastically from the original subject. We also noticed some noise problems. With longer shutter speeds and at ISO settings above 200, noise became a severe problem. This digital camera has an incredibly expansive ISO range, but its upper offerings are either riddled with noise or only available at a greatly reduced resolution.
The camera has 20 shooting modes, with the usual suspects (Portrait, Fireworks, etc) and a few interesting ones too. The Portrait & Landscape mode is interesting. It attempts to combine the two modes so you can shoot a portrait against a craggy landscape, for instance. There are also two modes called Shoot & Select, which take a sequence of pictures and then allow you to select the ones you want to retain without entering the Playback mode. The Olympus 1000’s Burst mode, while promising, is disappointingly slow. At lower resolution, it manages 3.6 frames per second, but shooting in full resolution slowed the pace considerably.
Olympus also touts the digital image stabilization feature, which boosts the shutter speed and ISO setting. Although it succeeds in freezing action without the flash, it leads to increased noise and is nowhere near as effective as the optical stabilization that other similarly priced models offer.
Once you’ve shot your image, the Olympus Stylus 1000 offers several features for tweaking them, including resizing and rotating. The Playback mode is also equipped with a Perfect Fix function that brightens shadows, removes red-eye and minimizes blur. It won’t replace Photoshop, but it is a nice feature to have on board.
The Movie mode captures QuickTime movies at up to 640 x 480-pixel resolution, with mono sound. You can set the white balance for the Movie mode, but there’s no access to the optical zoom and the camera doesn’t refocus while recording.
Other 10-megapixel cameras include the Canon PowerShot SD900 and Casio Exilim EX-Z1000. The SD900 has similar components like the 3x optical zoom lens and 2.5-inch, high-resolution LCD screen. It throws in trendy face detection technology though. The Z1000 has more Scene modes and a bigger 2.8-inch LCD screen, but doesn't stack up when it comes to its weak flash and limited ISO range.
The Stylus 1000 has some nice features, such as the 10-megapixel image sensor, that will attract many consumers. But there are a number of caveats that make it less attractive, such as the disappointing image quality and various limitations on the resolution (many Scene modes, ISO settings, and Burst modes limit the resolution to 3 or 5 megapixels). It’s an interesting overall package, but there are too many drawbacks to make it a true contender.
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