Customer Reviews:
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 Great Camera April 5, 2007
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
The new Olympus Stylus 770SW is the nicest camera to date I've purchased. It takes great pictures and is extremely durable. The picture quality is awesome in all types of weather conditions and lighting. I stronly suggest to purchase this if the price is right.
 Olympus 770 SW: A little gem March 29, 2007
168 out of 171 found this review helpful
I have an Olympus 770 SW (NOT the 720 SW), for sure...and I like it. I have had five digital cameras before, and this one is terrific. Considering that it's a sub-compact pocket camera, image quality is fine (not equal to that of a digital SLR, but I don't want to carry around a big box like a DSLR). Shadow detail is especially impressive. Operation is smooth and intuitive. The screen is fine, even outdoors. Shutter lag, a big concern of mine as I like to photograph my kids at sports, is minimal and can be zero if you prefocus. The number of custom scene settings is impressive. I bought it because of the waterproofing and shockproofing, and because of prior good experience with Olympus over the years, but I'm just as happy with the pictures it takes under normal circumstances too.
A few gripes that stop me from giving the camera 5 stars:
1. The battery cannot be recharged when it's in the camera. For a total of $80 or so, you can get an external power source and a cable, and together they let the camera run a long time without draining the battery, but they don't charge the battery. Battery life is fine for a day of normal shooting, but if you use the camera actively, every single night you pretty much have to unlock the case, take out the battery and charge it, then remember to put the battery back in the next day. Each charge takes 5 hours. I'm going to take the same $80 and instead buy two extra batteries to be comfortable--One in the camera, one reserve along with me, and another charging at home. Even so, it will take some planning and thinking to keep batteries ready all the time on a vacation. It would have been much nicer to have a holster or a charging socket on the case.
2. The case is actually smaller than it needs to be. It could be significantly bigger and still fit in my shirt pocket, which is my standard size requirement. As it is, the advanced engineering is impressive to pack all the features in a tiny box, but the camera is more expensive than need be, the lens is smaller than it should be (depending on zoom position, the lens is between f/3.5 to f/5.0, which is pretty weak), it's harder to hold the camera than need be, and if the case were bigger, there would be room for a nice little charging socket too.
3. There is indeed a background, almost mechanical noise introduced when filming videos. It probably can be filtered out, as it's very constant and very low pitched, but it's mildly annoying.
4. Time between shots is too long--it takes several seconds to save each shot at full resolution.
5. You can use the internal memory only if there's no memory card in the slot. Given the slow transfer speed to the card, it sure would be nice to be able to save a dozen or so shots very quickly to the internal memory and then transfer them to the memory when you have time.
For all that, though, I'm really looking forward to using this camera on a forthcoming sea kayaking and snorkeling trip this summer. With one camera, I'll be able to take snapshots above and below water, also modest videos underwater (there's a special scene selection to do just that)!
 So-so March 12, 2007
29 out of 43 found this review helpful
The fact that you can use this camera as a hammer, BUT, one of the most important features of the camera is Image Quality. Outdoor the images are OK, just OK, as my 5 year old CANON G3 takes 10 times better images in terms of sharpness and color saturation. The images that this camera take lack in quality simply becase the lens is tiny and therefore can't pass enough light, ESPECIALLY in low light conditions.
Overall, not a bad camera, but the screen is just SO-SO for outdoors and the image quality is just ok. Also it only shoots 15fps movies and not 30 as most other cameras. You can hear NOISE in the movies as if something mechanical is moving. Very strange, but it's true.
Hopefully the next version of camera will have these things improved.
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