Olympus Mju 810

Features
The Olympus Mju 810 can hit some incredibly high sensitivity settings for its class: ISO 1,600 and ISO 3,200 for extreme low-light or high-speed shots. It does so via Bright Capture, which uses clusters of sensor pixels to capture a each single image pixel, rather than individual ones (a process known as supersampling), effectively creating bigger pixels, each of which is more sensitive to light. Unfortunately, this results in fewer pixels in the final image; the Mju 810 can take ISO 3,200 shots at only 3-megapixel resolution. Olympus uses Bright Capture in a similar way--clustering pixels to increase the amount of light emitted--to boost the brightness of the LCD.

Unlike the high-ISO settings, the electronic image stabilization works in most shooting modes, including movie, though not burst mode. You can also apply it during playback.

The 3x optical zoom lens can focus on objects between 10 and 60cm in supermacro mode. If you don't need to get quite so close to your subject, standard macro can focus from 21cm to infinity. The lens's aperture is fixed at F2.8 at the wide-angle setting and F4.7 when fully zoomed in. The Olympus Mju 810 has no manual focus or exposure controls other than exposure compensation, but its 24 scene modes include various preset options such as Behind Glass, Documents, and Auction. The Shoot and Select scene modes are a variation on burst mode; you shoot a continuous sequence of pictures, which appear on the LCD. You can then keep or delete whatever shots you want from the batch.

Both multipoint/spot focus and exposure options are available on the Mju 810. After you've set those, the camera automatically chooses a shutter speed between 1/2 second to 1/1,000 second in normal shooting modes and up to 4 seconds in night scene modes. This model has 28MB of built-in memory; it's good for a few shots, but you'll want an xD-Picture Card to take more than a handful of photos at a time. If you want to use the camera's panorama mode to stitch up to 10 frames into one shot, you'll need an Olympus-brand card; it won't work with any others.

The Mju 810 has some interesting playback features, including in-camera albums and a calendar display that sorts images by date taken. With a Type H xD card, it can shoot 640 x 480, 30fps film clips with sound up to the capacity of the card; with others, you're limited to 15-second clips. Neither zoom nor focus can be adjusted while shooting.

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