A very versatile tough with decent IQ

Executive summary: great camera in terms of features for rough usage and 1080 video, not a camera that competes well for general-purpose use.  Read on for more details....  

In addition to having a few cheap "bag" housings for my bigger cameras, this is my third rugged compact camera. The first was an Olympus Stylus 1030 SW , which proved spectacularly rugged despite losing all the black paint on it and the metal frame around the lens; image quality (IQ) was decent, with the biggest problem being that it tended to easily get water drops trapped on the lens such that many photos after coming out of water would have big, blurry, water spots on them. The second was a Lumix DMC-TS2 purchased for my wife; it's a perfectly reasonable camera that has held-up well cosmetically, but somehow I never found it to be all that appealing. Both those two still work, so why the third rugged camera?

The TG-860 does two things that make it a winner:

• The lens goes ultra-wide.  21mm equivalent view makes a huge difference. You would think that might just be too wide for normal use, so you'd always have the slight delay of zooming in a bit for typical photos, but the scenarios where one uses this type of camera tend to be in-your-face things. That's why so many GoPro-like things have fisheye lenses -- but a fisheye distorts and that gets old fast. The wide angle also really helps underwater, because water clarity is often the limiting factor on IQ, and this lets you frame with less water between you and your subject.
• The rear LCD tilts.  I'm very used to a tilting LCD from my Sony E bodies, where I prefer the EVF, and mostly use the LCD for placing the camera where my face can't be. With this type of camera, it's much more common that it is where I don't want my face to be. For example, I can pivot the LCD up 90 degrees and hold the camera horizontally underwater while my face is above water, and I can still look down and see the LCD for framing my shots. This is a very big deal. Oh, and yes, you can pivot it all the way for selfies too.

The above two features have been as useful as I expected they might be, and justify the camera purchase all by themselves.

In addition, the lens of this camera seems to shed water droplets amazingly well -- they say it has a special coating for that. I'm usually using these kinds of cameras in wet conditions that are not underwater, and water droplets on the lens are the biggest IQ problem for that on my older rugged compacts and also on my very bulky-bagged cameras (e.g., Sony A7II); it just isn't much of an issue with this camera. Shake it a bit, droplets are all gone!

A couple of samples:

Underwater with TG860

Just barely above water with TG860

I will not post a video here, but suffice to say the 1080 footage is quite good.

Ok, all that was the good... now the bad.  In two letters, the bad is IQ.  While this camera very easily captures quite reasonable images under conditions few cameras can tolerate, it doesn't really do much better when conditions are good, and it doesn't deal with difficult lighting well at all.

Expect blurry photos in poor lighting due to either slow shutter speed or very heavy noise reduction. Dynamic range of the camera is terrible; ok, I'm spoiled by using Sony bodies that have an exceptional 13+ EV DR, but this looks like 7-8 EV when I have decade-old compacts that can deliver more like 9 EV. Of course, there's also no raw output option to try to save IQ in post.  All of this is an unfortunately familiar story WRT Olympus products in this niche....

In sum, this is a really easy to use rugged camera that will let you get the shot under circumstances that nothing else would, and it captures really quite nice 1080 video, but the truth is that the stills never get much better than frame grabs from the 1080 video. It's a great second camera for rough treatment, but there are cell phones that can beat it in still image IQ, and it's a bad joke in tough lighting. I would recommend it, but not as one camera to do everything; it's better to think of it as an upgrade on a GoPro than as a general-purpose compact that can handle rough usage....