Digital Home Thoughts: Olympus Mju Stylus 1030SW Review - It is Waterproof!

"Announced on the 22nd of January 2008, the Olympus Mju Stylus 1030SW is Olympus' latest ultra compact "tough" digital camera - it's designed to withstand the elements, and is waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof, crushproof, dustproof, scratchproof, and therefore also childproof! The camera features a 10 megapixel sensor, a wide angle 3.6x optical zoom lens, a 2.7" screen that works in the sun, and a VGA video mode. The Olympus Mju 1030SW is available from around £215 which makes it great value for money. The camera is enclosed in an extremely tough metal body and is available in black, silver, or green. The camera measures approx. 93.2 x 61.4 x 21.3 mm (excluding protrusions), and weighs approx. 173g. excluding battery and memory card."

What an excellent idea! My favorite part about this review was reading the following in the specs - Crushproof up to 100kg, Waterproof to 10m, Shockproof up to 2.0m, Freezeproof upto -10 C, Scratchproof, Dust resistant body. Although honestly, it is the waterproof part that caught my eye. Firstly, it doesn't just say water resistant like most watches do, so you can actually go under water with this. Second, since it is waterproof to about 10m, that makes it ideal when going snorkeling. The review also states that the image quality is quite nice so all in all this seems to be a really good camera.

But here is the weird thing - I was going to say that this camera is a little expensive if one plans to use this only as a snorkeling companion when I saw the price quoted in the review (GBP215) but when I started looking on pricegrabber and Windows Live Product Search (in order to see what the cheapest price I could find for it was), all I could find was a $189 underwater housing for this camera. So the waterproofness fo the camera is suddenly a little suspect to me. I guess the housing is simply to increase the depth to which one can take the camera.

Of course, Olympus' site (UK site here) certainly shows this to be a legitimate camera with the right set of features and accessories so this just may be an issue of the camera not having made it out to most online retail stores yet. Estimated retail in the US is $399.