Photo gallery: Olympus Mju 760We suspect Olympus must have put Hermes in charge of the Mju digital camera releases since they came to market so quickly -- the Mju 740 and 750 are barely six months old. With an accelerated release schedule like that, there's not a lot of time to make significant changes from model to model. So, it's unsurprising this little camera doesn't differ much from its predecessors. But its small form and mechanical image stabilisation still make it a very appealing camera.
Design
As with all of its siblings, the Mju 760's most distinctive feature is its sleek, weather-resistant metal body. The stylish camera, measuring just 24.4mm thick and weighing only 120 grams, is small and light enough to fit into almost any pocket and comes in pink as well as the usual silver version. The camera's body is sealed against moisture and gunk, so it can handle splashes, showers, and snowstorms. It's not completely waterproof, though, and probably won't survive being submerged in water. If you really need a submersible camera, you should consider the Mju 760's significantly sturdier and more expensive bigger brother, the Tough 770SW. The 770SW can function in up to 10 metres underwater and can handle far more drops, stomps, and chills than the 760.
Features
The Mju 760 features Olympus' Dual Image Stabilisation (DIS), a hybrid electronic and mechanical system that combines ISO boosting with shifting the camera's sensor to compensate for shake. The latter does the bulk of the work. You can enable DIS by pressing a tiny button on top of the camera, next to the shutter release. While DIS helped reduce some shake and blur in our photos, it just didn't seem quite as effective as the optimal image stabilisation we've seen on other compact cameras, such as the Canon Digital IXUS 850 IS. Still, the feature works better than most cameras that just boost the sensor's sensitivity.
Besides the shiny shell and image stabilisation, the Mju 760 has a mostly standard feature set. The camera includes a fairly narrow-angle 37mm-to-111mm-equivalent 3X zoom lens, a 7-megapixel sensor that can reach up to ISO 1,600 sensitivity, 26 shot presets, and a built-in help guide to walk users through setting up shots. These features are useful, but there is very little you wouldn't find on almost any other Olympus Stylus camera and most of their higher-end FE-series cameras.
Performance
The Mju 760's performance was decent, but not remarkable. After a 2.1-second time to first shot, the camera could take a shot every two seconds thereafter. With the onboard flash enabled, that time increased to three seconds per shot. Shutter lag was a brisk 0.5 second in bright light, though shooting targets in dim light more than tripled the lag to 1.7 seconds.
(Seconds--smaller is better)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Frames per second--larger is better)
Image quality
Our testing yielded reasonably sharp photos with well-resolved details in the centre, although there were a few spots where postprocessing smeared some edges -- a common problem in compacts. Colours tended to be a bit too cool but appropriately saturated, and measured noise was surprisingly low, appearing as only a moderate grain even at ISO 800. At ISO 1,600, however, the photos exploded with noise-driven speckles and fuzz. As you'd expect from the narrow, short-range zoom lens, distortion was almost nonexistent, barreling only slightly at the edges at its widest.
Though its images aren't perfect and it's a bit sluggish, the Olympus Mju 760 is still a good compact camera. Its light, pocketable design and logical, simple features make it a fine choice for anyone who wants a small camera he or she can take nearly anywhere.
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