Olympus Mju 9000

Olympus Mju 9000

Price: $499

Features: Optical zoom: 10x
Camera resolution: 12.0Mp
LCD screen: 2.7″
Video resolutions: 640×480
Video speed: 15, 30 fps
Supported media: Micro-SD, xD card
Wired terminals: USB 2.0

Pros: 10x optical zoom, illuminated control buttons, great super-macro mode.

Cons: Auto modes tend to over-expose shots on bright days, possible to install battery the wrong way around, soft images, uses xD cards instead of SD, sluggish performance.

The final word: There is plenty to like about the Olympus Mju 9000: it has a great zoom lens, useful in-camera editing functions and panorama stitching. You might have to play around with it in order to get the best image quality, but it can take clear and vibrant photos.

IT may be a small digital camera, but the Olympus Mju 9000 packs a stack of features, a 12-megapixel (Mp) CCD sensor and a telephoto zoom lens. This makes it a versatile camera that’s suitable for shooting anything from portraits to landscapes, but it does take some know-how to wrangle the best possible image quality out of it.

While it has auto and intelligent auto modes that can in theory detect the best settings to use for a particular scene, it doesn’t always select the best options. Many of out test shots on a bright day looked too blue and had blown highlights. We had to play with the scene modes to make our shots look more realistic and temper the exposure. For example, we used the Beach and Snow mode on a bright day in the city.

The Olympus Mju 9000 isn’t set up to shoot photos at the highest detail setting by default; you have to change this in the configuration menu to ensure you’re getting the sharpest possible photos.

Once the detail level and the scene mode have been set, the Olympus Mju 9000 can take some wonderful photos, but there are still some issues with their quality: images ended up looking soft, with noticeable haloing around objects that were well illuminated by sunlight. That’s not to say the pictures lacked detail – in fact, the Mju 9000 can capture excellent detail with its 10x optical zoom – it just seems to struggle a little when handling bright situations. It works much better when the light isn’t strongly hitting your subject. We also noticed some unwanted lens flare from sunlight creeping into our shots from the side.