Olympus 1030 SW Mini-Review.

[sk66]

I recently purchased this camera (well, actually I purchased a second one after a couple weeks) and would like to give my quick impressions:
To the point, a great pocket camera...I highly recommend it.

Some details: 10.1MP, 200# impact resistance, 33' depth waterproof
At 10MP fine it takes very nice pics at ISO's up to 800(daylight) at ISO 800/1600 it gets noisy (low light)
Jpeg only; at 10.1mp/fine I can get over 400 images on a 2gb XD card.
Jpeg's have a little jpeg artifact color noise...seems like less than my Nikon D200 did when Jpeg fine.
It's neat taking underwater pictures! Does a decent job of it within it's limitations..
User interface is friendly.
Can manually adjust ISO...I'll usually do this in order to change the Fstop. No manual fstop settings. Otherwise it seems to automaticly go for max shutter speed.
Has this cool little LED light to illuminate subjects in macro mode where flash would not work. (kind of a one sided ring-light)

Positives:
Alot of capability in a pocket size P/S
Does things I can't do with my DSLR (underwater) and does better at Macro than my DSLR (without macro lens)
Excellent battery life
Adequate Manual adjustments (iso, exposure comp)
Exposes correctly (usually)
Exposes colors very well IMO. (it also has many "presets" to fine tune auto mode)
Very good image quality( within it's limits) with very good storage capacity (2gb XD card, not included)
Can take limited video

Negatives:
It's a little bigger than I wanted for a pocket camera.
Would like "full manual" ability
Jpeg only file system
XD card system...yep, another format for the collectiion
A little awkward to hold one handed...it's just too flat/square/smooth

There's more to this thing than listed...like an alarm clock (which I don't think would wake me up) all of the "scene selection" presets, Anti shake, excellent cold weather performance, etc. but those are things I'm not really using as of yet.

BTW, I bought the second one for my son who's last point and shoot suffered a broken screen due to pocket carry...The impact resistance of this camera should help greatly.

Both camera's are Olympus factory (direct) refurbs for aprox $300 w/ 90 day warranty