Physical Tour

Front

On the front of the camera are the major elements; the lens, the LED illuminator and the flash. There is also a sliding panel that covers these when not in use, and which also doubles as an on/off switch. You can also see the edge of the battery and memory card cover at the bottom.

 

The large metal bar slides up to cover the front of the camera

and protect the lens and flash

Back

The back of the 1050SW is mostly taken up by the sizable 2.7-inch LCD. To the right of this are the controls; from the top we have the zoom control, the mode dial and the 4-way control which is surrounded by 4 control buttons. You can also glimpse the shutter button at the top of the camera. Patience; we'll get to that soon.

 

Most of the back is taken up by the large 2.7-inch LCD

Sides*
*The left side of the 1050SW is a fairly boring place, except for a couple of screws and two small holes that cover the speaker.

The left side of the camera  is mostly harmless,

unless you have a small hole phobia**

**** The right side is far more exciting, boasting the cover for the USB and A/V port and another speaker. A large wrist strap loop is positioned in the middle of this side as well. The foreboding metal loop is not the standard strap provided by Olympus: that's a special one to stop people at the Photokina show where we looked at the camera from walking off with it.

*The right side of the 1050SW is home to the

USB and AV outputs, under a protective cover
*

Top

There are two buttons on the top of the camera; the power button and the shutter. There is also a third lump that looks a bit like a button, but it is not; the raised ridge by the shutter is there to give your index finger something to rest on while it isn't on the shutter.

Buttons are gasketed inside to keep water out.

Bottom

The bottom left side is taken up by the cover that protects the battery and memory card cavities. This large cover  has to be waterproof, so it has a number of rubber seals around the edge that keep the outside world out and the electricity in. The catch requires quite a lot of movement to release, but that's a good thing.  If the door accidentally opened while scuba diving, a passing electric eel might develop an emotional attachment to your battery.

The cover for the battery and memory card compartment is on the left

 

Components

Viewfinder

There is no viewfinder on the 1050SW; everything is done through the LCD screen, which we discuss below.
LCD Screen
The LCD screen of the 1050SW is a 2.7-inch affair with 230,000 pixels. This is a little on the low side; other cameras have similar sized screens with higher resolutions, which makes for sharper previews and an easier way to check focus and fine details. The LCD is not a touch screen, but there is a way to control the camera by touch; it responds to taps on the sides, top and back. We'll discuss this more in the controls section.

The 2.7-inch LCD screen is  pretty clear and bright,

but not that sharp

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Flash
The small flash sits on the front of the camera near the lens; it does not pop up, out or around. It is located very close to the small lens, which won't help when it comes to avoiding red-eye. Cameras with flashes very close to the lens are more prone to this, but the 1050SW does try and compensate for this with a red eye reduction flash mode, designed to reduce red-eye with a series of pre-flashes. Olympus does not quote a the guide number for the flash, but small flashes like this don't tend to have enough power to reach into the inky depths. Next to the lens is a small auto focus illuminator LED, which is used to help the auto focus out in dark spots, as well as in a special macro mode for illuminating small objects.

**

The flash is located close to the lens.

******Lens **
The Olympus lens has a native focal length of 6.7mm - 20.1mm. Translated into a 35mm film camera equivalent, this is a 38 to 114mm lens, which does not offer much wide-angle coverage. Although it has a decent telephoto range, the relatively small wide-angle setting means the 1030SW won't work well for large groups. If a troop of dolphins starts doing a song and dance number in front of you, you might have a problem getting the ones on the edge in.

The small lens of the 1050SW has imited wide-angle coverage

Connections
There is only one port on the 1050SW, which does triple duty as a USB port, A/V output and power input. Cramming all of this into one connector makes for a simpler camera, but also means that the cables are proprietary; if you lose one, you have to buy another one from Olympus.

One single port handles USB, A/V and power
Battery
The battery in the 1050SW is a 660mAh model. We weren't able to test the battery life of the camera, but Olympus quotes it at 200 shots, which is a bit on the low side.  

The battery slides out from the bottom of the camera**Memory**
The 1050SW can handle two types of memory cards: xD Picture cards and Micro SD cards. Only one can be installed at a time though, and MicroSD cards require an adapter, which is included. 

**Other Features
***Water, shock and freeze proofing *– The 1050SW has rubber seals around the ports and covers and is guaranteed to survive water up to 10 feet deep, a drop from 5 feet and temperatures down to -10 degrees Celsius (-14 degrees Fahrenheit).

*Panorama *– The 1050SW includes a panorama mode that stitches together three shots by simply pressing the shutter and panning around; the camera captures the images and patches them together in memory. However, the in-camera stitching is only available if you use an Olympus-brand xD Picture Card. 

Face Tracking & Smile Recognition* - *Olympus claims the 1050SW can track up to 16 faces at once. We don't have that many friends (especially at the Photokina show where we examined the camera), so we weren't able to test this claim fully. However, face tracking did work as advertised with the few friendly faces we could find. It also includes smile shot, which will take a photo, examine to see if the subject is smiling and, if not,  take another three photos in quick succession, in the hope that one of them will capture a beaming, happy mug shot.

Design / Layout

Model Design / Appearance
The 1030SW has a chunky, brick-like design. It's not going to win any fashion awards, but it has a clean, utilitarian look that serves it well. And at around 6 ounces (170g) and 0.9 inches (23mm) thick, it is definitely pocketable.

Size and Handling

The rectangular design of the 1050SW means it fits into the hand reasonably well; the index finger falls naturally onto the shutter, and the raised ledge next to that gives it something to grasp without taking a photo. But the placement of the zoom control at the top of the back is not so good. We found that our grip slipped somewhat when we reached for the zoom with the thumb, making the camera tip forwards.

*

• The 1050SW fits comfortably into the hand, but the
  

zoom control is poorly placed

Menu
The on-screen menu of the 1050SW is accessed with a single press of the menu button, and the resulting menu is fairly well structured, making it mostly easy to find the required controls and change them.

 *

**

• Ease of Use
  

Most cameras place controls for the flash and the like on buttons, but the 1050SW also adds a new approach, called 'tap control.' When taking photos, two taps on the right side of the camera body brings up a flash control menu. Another tap on the right side scrolls through the menu, and a tap on the top selects the highlighted option. The idea is that it allows you to control the camera without taking gloves or the like off, and it works surprisingly well. It also works in other modes. In playback mode (which, incidentally, you can access by tapping on the back of the camera) you can scroll through stored  images with a left and right tap. Although it only provides access to two features in shooting mode (the backlight compensation and the flash modes), it's an interesting and useful idea. 

 *

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**

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Modes

Auto Mode**
The auto mode on the dial does what you'd expect; sets the camera to fully automatic mode, where all decisions are made by the camera. We weren't able to test how well these decisions work out, though, without lab-testing image quality. The user still gets some limited control here; they can set  the image size and quality, but everything else is locked out. 

Movie Mode
Setting the dial to the film camera icon puts the 150SW in movie mode, and the camera can capture videos at up to 640 x 480 resolution, at 30 or 15 frames per second. This puts it a bit behind the curve for cameras that can capture high definition video; cameras like the just announced Samsung TL34HD can capture much higher-resolution video. 

Drive / Burst Mode**
At the top 10.1 megapixel resolution, Olympus claims that the 1050SW can capture 0.38 frames per second, which is very slow. If you don't mind sacrificing some resolution, you can increase this to 5.4 frames per second at a reduced 3-megapixel resolution. With numbers like these, nobody is going to accuse the 1050SW of being a fast camera, and it would not be a good pick if you are looking for a camera to regularly capture football games or high-speed sports.

Playback Mode
The 1050SW offers a good selection of options for viewing images, including the ability to create slideshows, do basic editing and to otherwise tweak and display images. The editing features on offer include the Perfect Fix (which tries to correct for common exposure problems automatically) and the ability to resize, crop and perform basic color editing of captured photos. Slideshows can also be set up, and don't forget that the tap control allows you to move between images during playback with a tap on the left or right side. 

Custom Image Presets**
The scene mode option on the mode dial offers a wide selection of scene modes; 23 in all, including a few unusual ones, such as cuisine, behind glass and underwater snapshot. It remains to be seen how useful these prove to be, but we do like the inclusion of an underwater mode in a camera that can handle a few feet of submersion. 

Control Options

Manual Control Options
The 1050SW is lacking in the manual control options, as there is no full manual mode, and no dedicated shutter or aperture priority mode. This omission won't be a problem for most users, but it might be limiting for those who want to try and explore what can be done by taking control of the picture-taking process. 

Focus
Auto Focus
Three auto focus modes are available: Face Detect, iESP and Spot. The first mode tries to detect faces and use them to set both focus and exposure. If it can't find a face, this mode defaults to spot mode. In iESP mode, the camera picks an object in view and focuses on that, while spot mode uses a central spot for focusing. We found the focusing to be generally quick and accurate; both the face detect and iESP modes also usually found the right subject to focus in on.

ISO
The ISO range of the 1050SW starts at 80 and goes up to 1600. That's a pretty standard range that will cover most situations, but an increasing number of cameras are offering higher settings. This could have been especially useful in the dimly lit underwater world of the 1050SW user. A full auto ISO mode is also available

White Balance
The usual selection of white balance settings are present and correct; there are settings for daylight, cloudy, tungsten, and three fluorescent settings. The latter is slightly unusual (and could be useful), with sub-types for daylight fluorescent tubes, neutral fluorescent and white fluorescent. However, there is no way to evaluate white balance from a photo or enter a white balance value directly. Most users won't miss this, but it is nice to have the option. 

Metering
Three metering options are available: Digital ESP (which evaluates the scene and picks the settings), face detection (which uses the faces to meter against) and spot metering, which uses a small spot in the center of the screen. We weren't able to judge the accuracy of these settings in our tests at Photokina. 

Shutter Speed
The shutter speed ranges from a relatively quick 1/1000 of a second down to 4 seconds in the night scene mode. In full auto mode, the longest shutter speed is 1/4 of a second. Again, that's a decent range, but more creative types may feel constrained by the 1/4 of a second limitation and the lack of a shutter priority mode. 

Aperture
The widest aperture the built-in lens can manage is f/3.5 at the wide end of the range and f/5.0 at the telephoto range. Olympus did not specify a minimum aperture for either end of the zoom range.

**Image Stabilization
**The 1050SW offers digital image stabilization, where the camera will boost the shutter speed and ISO to try and eliminate blur. Although this helps, it is not usually as effective as optical image stabilization.

Picture Quality / Size Options
The 1050SW offers two choices for image compression: Fine and Normal. For image size, the range goes from 3648 x 2736 pixels right down to 640 x 480, with several stops along the way.

Picture Effects Mode
The 1050SW does not offer any picture effects while shooting, but you can transform pictures after they have been shot  to make them look black and white or sepia if you feel inclined.

Conclusion

**

Conclusion**

If you are the sort of person who likes to visit moderately dangerous places, the Stylus 1050SW is worth considering. It is water, shock and freezeproof, so it should stand up to shallow water, drops and chilly weather. But the 1030SW may be a better pick if you like to go to really dangerous places; since it can survive diving deeper and falling farther.

We weren't able to test the image quality of the 1050SW, but the resolution increase to 10.1 megapixels looks to be a positive step. And the new tap control system works well; although it only offers access to a couple of controls, it is definitely easier to use than the on-screen menu. Our only real complaint was the poor placement of the zoom control. It just wasn't comfortable to use with one hand.

So, for those who need a camera that can stand up to some rough treatment, the 1050SW looks to be an interesting option.