Olympus µ 1040 review

Olympus's latest camera is a departure from its usual wedge-shaped designs.

Its minimalist metal body is delightfully slim, light and elegant, if rather similar to recent Sony designs. A crop of buttons next to the 2.7in screen are mounted behind a flexible metal veneer. This looks smart but makes them quite fiddly, and the layout is a little counter-intuitive, too. Still, as a point-and-shoot camera it's easy enough to operate.

Performance is a weak area. The 1040 took 3.3 seconds to switch on and capture a shot, and there was a gap of almost five seconds between shots. Continuous shooting is very fast at 14fps, but is limited to just 12 frames at three megapixels. Olympus has stubbornly used xD media for years, despite its poor performance, but this camera shows the first signs of change. It comes with a microSD-to-xD adaptor, and using this gave a tangible improvement, lowering the average interval between shots to 3.6 seconds. That's still slow, though, and Olympus has more work to do to match the two seconds or less achieved by other manufacturers.

Image quality was exactly as we expect from a 1/2.3in, ten-megapixel sensor: not very good. Detail levels were pretty atrocious at ISO 400 and above, thanks to heavy-handed noise reduction. Colours were undersaturated, presumably in a further attempt to suppress noise. The camera limited ISO speeds to 400 on automatic settings, but this meant indoor photos were often both noisy and blurry. A high-sensitivity mode avoided blur at the expense of even more noise and less detail. Outdoors, the camera fared much better, producing better photos than the Nikon S610 reviewed above, for example.

The 1040 is a clear case of style over substance, but it's attractively priced and takes better pictures than some pricier ten-megapixel cameras. However, cheaper cameras such as Samsung's NV8 are much better still.