Olympus Stylus 790 SW (mju 790 SW Digital)

Opinion: I took this camera on a surf trip and opted to leave my heavier camera and waterproof case at home. Big mistake. First off i would like to say the camera is very easy to use. The video quality isn't bad either...........However.

Opinion: I shoot surf photos while surfing, so my review is slanted towards this quite specific usage.

Construction: Camera feels pretty sturdy. I did buy one of those rubber covers (condoms, actually for the 770) for a little bit of added protection. The cam has already handled a 3' (accidental) drop onto concrete (don't tell Olympus!). The gaskets look a bit suspect so I'm hoping the rubber cover will help buffer any water impact pressure to the seams. So far so good.

Features: Pretty much standard features. I like the Guidebook built into the cam. One bad thing though is that I typically shoot in Sport mode, but the camera requires confirmation every time you turn on the camera. Would have been nice to have a wider angle than the 38mm equiv. 3x zoom is standard fare for this price point. Nice to be able to choose from four different camera colors (I got black--looks pretty elegant).

Image quality: I know it isn't related to megapixels (7.1 in this case), but I had hopes that the quality would be better. Unfortunately, I've only managed fair quality images. I hope my picture quality will improve as I master the camera's ideosyncrasies even more.

Ease of use: Shooting from the water is challenging in and of itself. No need the camera to add to the complexity. The camera sometimes goes into different menus by accidental button bumping. Camera feels dainty, and the location of the shutter button makes it hard to shoot with just one hand. Having the lens cap is good to protect the lens, but maintenance is more difficult. For shooting surf, the inset lens is difficult to clear of water droplets, and hard to spit on (to sheet the water). The 2.5" lcd screen is absolutely gorgeous though.

Value for money: I've owned five point-and-shoot digital cams and I believe this camera is a decent value. The old Olympus 770s were priced $80 higher. The Pentax WP series are around $300 just like the 790. However, the 790 uses an xD memory card which tends to be more costly compared to other cards of comparable memory size.

Opinion: Good unit!! great camera for children,parents&mother with suckee children who want to use it also.
Face Detection work good even after my son droped it twice!!!
You can swim with it!!!
and DROP IT !!!??? + not tryed the Freezeproof Yet
No I do not use it and it will not compeat with my 40D but on vacation by the pool I would not want anything else!!!
After my son damaged a -
~Sony that droped of a coffie table!!
~Nikon that got put down on some spilt water
~Panosonic zoom opened when in the case and they wanted 107$ to fix?

Opinion: I had purchased this camera because I have kids who like to take pictures and for it's waterproof claims. I had also tried it's predecessor but it went to the store as I didn't like the picture quality.

The Stylus 790 was excellent at picture taking, it was sharp, the colors were accurate and the menus were so much easier to navigate, plus it has the edit of the pictures option(very handy) plus u can add borders and whatever else on the camera, I thought it was very cool(it saved me time with photoshop). So, everything was great, excellent pictures, good quality, video...until...we took it with us to Mexico on a trip. It was working fine and then on the last 3 days it gave me a card error. When I took it out of the water and opened the card compartment I realized there was water on the XD card and since it's salt water the card got corrosion. The camera came on and off on occasions but when it did it always give me a card error. That was it for my snorkeling or picture taking. On top of it all I didn't think I would be able to retrieve all the 700 pictures that I had taken, when we came back home the camera dried up and I was able to get the pictures out. FYI the camera was never under even 5 feet.

Overall, it's an excellent camera if it was really waterproof, it's stylish, very good body built, very light compared to my new Canon SD870, and got lots of options. When they fix up the kinks with the waterproof then it's going to be an ideal camera.