It occurs to me that a single thread to cover camera reviews might be useful. The idea here is not to repost others views but your own thoughts and comments on cameras you own or have had a chance to take for a good test ride.

Mostly thumbs up on this one except battery life is pathetic.

Olympus Tough 3000 WP Camera Review
By: Bob F

I know it is traditional to include lots of images with camera reviews. But truthfully it is not really necessary.

This is a water proof and shock resistant camera with a 28-100 mm equivalent lens. The wide angle end shows virtually no barrel distortion. Overall a good lens but somewhat limited at the telephoto end. Like most WP cameras it will sink so use a lanyard to secure it. Uses a 3.6Volt Li-Ion battery, charger hooks directly to the camera and is included. It uses SD memory cards, a big change from the XD cards used by previous Olympus Cameras. Price originally started at around $240 and is now generally available at under $200.

The camera is rated at 12 MP and that number is a bald faced lie. Like all small point and shoot cameras the pixels are there but the capture detail is not. The sensor (~4.25mm x 5.5mm) is simply too small to capture that much detail. Images are captured at 3 MP and everything else is interpolated. If you take an image at 12 MP and view it at 100% don’t expect it to be any better than taking the same image at 3 MP image and interpolating up to 12 MP with PhotoShop.

Note: in the central part of the image, best detail capture is at 8MP but is only marginally better than at other settings. As you get out towards the edges there is no advantage to going any larger than 3 or 5 MP.

Besides being rugged and waterproof, this camera also features super close-up abilities and a high speed burst setting. The extreme close-up is adequate but will in no way rival the results of a larger, much more expensive camera with the bigger 12x15mm sensor. It is also battery vampire.

The high speed burst mode defaults to 3MP images and shoots at an ISO of 640. No choice here. For non-burst shooting you can force ISOs up to 1600, but even so 640 is the maximum usable speed. Higher speeds are too “noisy” for anything but special effects. Using the internal card, the machine gun feature will snap off 10+ frames in rapid succession. Using a standard SD card this number drops to 3 or 4. I would expect a high speed SD card to do as well as the internal card but have not tried it as yet. Good news here is that the burst mode does not suck the life out of the battery. However transferring images from the internal card to the SD card requires a major safari through the menus. The internal card will hold at least 80-3 MP images so hopefully one will have time to make the transfer before the next round.

It does have a panorama mode which is not reliable even with a tripod.

Like most Olympus cameras, the images require very little in the way of tweaking. Both colour balance and density are excellent right off the card. The images are overly blurred to hide all traces of noise. As a general rule a slight sharpening in PhotoShop, PS Elements or iPhoto will restore maximum detail.

Overall I like the camera as I can carry it in the sleeve pocket of my dry top, thus it is instantly available whenever the water is calm enough to use it. For me battery life is the biggest issue. A fully charged battery is good for about 70-75 images. Change the flash setting from “Auto” to “Off”, disable the anti-shake feature and you might get 100-110 images. Hardly adequate for an extended wilderness trip. Turning off auto-flash and anti-shake also helps reduce shutter lag to a minimum.

Note: Shooting at 3 MP might extend battery life a bit further. I really doubt that I am capturing any more detail at 5 MP than at the lower setting. Either way the camera is capable of producing an excellent 8x10 print and could probably go to 11x14 with some images.

Edit: Probably should have mentioned the flash but I hardly ever use it. Red eye reduction works well but I prefer to not deal with the delay and correct for red-eye later. Even with no fall off at the widest angle (28MM). Optimum range is ~6 to 8 feet. Because there is a lot of latitude to under exposure, decent flash shots to about 18 feet are possible with later adjustments in PS or Elements. Increasing the ISO on flash shots will not improve the range in the least. All it does is increase the noise.

While fill in flash is possible it usually not very effective.

Further edit:

Recently ordered some RAM so also picked up an inexpensive 1GB Lexar SD ultra speed chip (133x)

So the burst mode works just fine with this chip. Snapped off 19 frames in under 7 seconds. Quite adequate for my needs.

Also decided to test the 720p video with the newer chip. No issues with a 45 second clip. Auto focus and auto exposure do work with some slight lag noticeable. However the optical zoom stays wherever it was when you started recording. Easier than many still cameras to do a video clip as you just push the red button to start recording, and again to stop. A bit less than 1MB per second of video with sound. For whatever reason video clips play perfectly in iMovie 6 but are very jerky when played in QT. My QT player is as up to date as Tiger allows. FWIW this would not normally be a camera I would choose for video except that being waterproof can be a real plus at times.

Encore edit:

Took awhile but I discovered that the battery/card/cable cover has a mechanical lock that if used, should ensure that the cover cannot possibly pop open accidentally. A real plus for a camera intended for rugged use.

Some Pictures
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This last shot is underwater and did require slight colour adjustment, I also boosted contrast and applied a slight sharpening filter.
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It occurs to me that a single thread to cover camera reviews might be useful. The idea here is not to repost others views but your own thoughts and comments on cameras you own or have had a chance to take for a good test ride.

I agree with you that reviews from the users perspective are great to have here ... but I wouldn't want to see them all piling up in a single thread. I'd rather see a separate thread for each camera review with an informative title on it personally. I HATE having to dig through hundreds of pages of posts to get at information I'm looking for personally. The big long thread for posting photos is not so bad as it's an ongoing thing, but for informational posts I'd rather see each have it's own home ... just my $0.02. Good review!

I agree with you that reviews from the users perspective are great to have here ... but I wouldn't want to see them all piling up in a single thread. I'd rather see a separate thread for each camera review with an informative title on it personally. I HATE having to dig through hundreds of pages of posts to get at information I'm looking for personally. The big long thread for posting photos is not so bad as it's an ongoing thing, but for informational posts I'd rather see each have it's own home ... just my $0.02. Good review!

I tend to agree and disagree. Truth is cameras evolve so fast that the latest 20-30 entries may be all one needs to review.

Whatever route the reviews do need to be titled to make searches easier.

I also think that each camera should have it's own thread. If your looking for a point and shoot then you probably don't want to read a review on a DSLR.

John

I tend to agree and disagree. Truth is cameras evolve so fast that the latest 20-30 entries may be all one needs to review.

Whatever route the reviews do need to be titled to make searches easier.

I guess it depends on how you look at it, but for me it's more useful if there's a thread titled "Review: Such and such camera" ... then all the comments and ongoing information that thread contains will be on that specific camera (hopefully).

With a single thread holding all the information for multiple reviews it can end up getting really fragmented quickly and hard to find the info you're looking for, especially when people start commenting on specific reviews and such.

The search tool is more useful to me for finding threads on the specifics I'm looking for as opposed to individual posts within massive threads. For example it would be hard to follow an ongoing discussion about one camera when the comments are dispersed across many pages and have all kinds of other non-related information in between.

Just something I wanted to mention,

In 2011, a project I am doing for ehMac.ca early in the year (100% for sure) is to have a new review section. The review section will have a database of Mac related products, but also have a Photography section where I'll have some specific photo gear.

If we do any reviews here, we'll be able to copy and paste them over to that section as well.

Will be a neat way for sure to have products organized with all their specs, photo of the item etc.. and we ehMacians with experience on them can chyme in and write a review but also rate the products as well.

Just something I wanted to mention,

In 2011, a project I am doing for ehMac.ca early in the year (100% for sure) is to have a new review section. The review section will have a database of Mac related products, but also have a Photography section where I'll have some specific photo gear.

If we do any reviews here, we'll be able to copy and paste them over to that section as well.

Will be a neat way for sure to have products organized with all their specs, photo of the item etc.. and we ehMacians with experience on them can chyme in and write a review but also rate the products as well.

Feel free to use the above review assuming it is still somewhat current at that time. I have edited by adding the following bit about the flash just above the sample images.

Edit: Probably should have mentioned the flash but I hardly ever use it. Red eye reduction works well but I prefer to not deal with the delay and correct for red-eye later. Even with no fall off at the widest angle (28MM). Optimum range is ~6 to 8 feet. Because there is a lot of latitude to under exposure, decent flash shots to about 18 feet are possible with later adjustments in PS or Elements. Increasing the ISO on flash shots will not improve the range in the least. All it does is increase the noise.

While fill in flash is possible it usually not very effective.

Further edit added:

Recently ordered some RAM so also picked up a 1GB ultra speed Lexar SD chip (133x)

So the burst mode works just fine with this chip. Snapped off 19 frames in under 7 seconds. Quite adequate for my needs.

Also decided to try out the 720p video with the newer chip. Again no issues with a 45 second clip. Auto focus and auto exposure do work with some slight lag noticeable. However the optical zoom stays wherever it was when you started recording. Easier than many still cameras to do a video clip as you just push the red button to start recording, and again to stop. A bit less than 1MB per second of video with sound....

Encore edit added:

Took awhile but I discovered that the battery/card/cable cover has a mechanical lock that if used, should ensure that the cover cannot possibly pop open accidentally. A real plus for a camera intended for rugged use.