How Does it Compare?

The ultra-compact arena has some tough competitors, so you really need a really strong product in order to come out on top. While the Olympus Stylus 710 has a nice design and some neat features, it ultimately has too many flaws, thus relegating it to “average” status.

The Stylus 710 is a very stylish, wedge-shaped ultra-compact camera. Olympus touts its scratchproof finish, and sure enough, the Stylus was the only metal camera to survive my ten camera Stanford trip without even a mark. Not only is the body scratchproof, but it's also water resistant as well. While you can't go swimming with it (without the optional underwater case, that is), the Stylus can get splashed, and since everything is sealed, dust, sand, and dirt stay out of the camera's important parts too. The camera is well designed for the most part, though it would've been nice if some of the buttons were a little bit larger. The Stylus has a large 2.5" LCD display that's great in low light, but the 115,000 pixel resolution left something to be desired.

The Stylus is a point-and-shoot camera with quite a few bells and whistles (too bad none of them are manual controls). They include an elaborate in-camera help system (that goes as far as automatically picking the settings for you), scores of scene modes, title, border, and calendar creation, and various high sensitivity modes. Those high sensitivity modes (called digital image stabilization and available light), which are all the rage these days, weren't terribly impressive. While yes, they do result in blur-free photos, you'll have so much noise in them that you'll be stuck with a 4 x 6 inch print if you're lucky. Instead of using those modes, my advice is to set the ISO manually, and try to keep it at 400 or below. The Stylus' movie mode wasn't great, with so-so video quality and a choppy frame rate.

Camera performance was fairly good. The Stylus starts up in an average 2 seconds, but then it focuses quickly, lacks any noticeable shutter lag, and can take another shot without any major delays. The Stylus' burst mode wasn't much to write home about. At the normal speed it takes just three shots in a row at 1.1 frames/second. While the high speed mode takes more photos (and at a much faster rate), it does so by cutting the resolution down to 3 Megapixel. Battery life on the Stylus was average for its class.

Photo quality is the Stylus 710's weak spot. While it took well-exposed photos with accurate color and low purple fringing levels, fine details in my photos were quite muddy, even at the lowest ISO setting. In addition, there was noticeable corner softness in many of my sample photos. While this may not matter to the typical buyer of a camera like this, those who want to make larger prints or view them at full size on their computer screen will see this and will likely be disappointed. One thing that will get you no matter what size the print is redeye, which is quite bad on the camera. The built-in redeye reduction feature did not improve the situation, at least in my testing.

There are a few other things that I want to mention. While nearly all cameras in this class are point-and-shoot, most offer at least manual white balance and slow shutter speed options. The latter feature would've really helped on this camera, as the night shot was quite lousy since I was forced to use a scene mode. Second, the camera lacks an AF-assist lamp, which led to just average low light focusing. Third, you cannot swap memory cards while the camera is on a tripod, which may or may not bother you. And finally, the included 19MB of memory is very little for a 7.1 Megapixel camera.

While there are some nice features on the Stylus 710, I was ultimately disappointed with its photo quality, which is the most important feature on any camera. If you're only going to be making 4 x 6 prints and can live with the flaws I mentioned in this review, then I suppose it's worth a look, but the bottom line is that there are better cameras out there in this class.