Physical Tour

With a crisp metal face plate and nicely engraved lettering, the front of the 710 is pretty slick. Engraved on the front left of the face plate is "7.1 Megapixel." About halfway over is the 3x lens, which protrudes when powered up and then retracts back so it’s flush with the body when asleep or powered down. Just above the lens to the right is the small rectangular flash, and below that on a stainless steel plate is the Olympus logo. Engraved below on the right is the model name and the words "All-Weather."

**Back
**The top edge of the 710’s back has been cut off by a long beveled plane, giving the camera a wedge shape. Taking up most of the back of the camera is its 2.5-inch LCD. On the upper right is a zoom rocker and below that is the control dial with six settings. On the bottom right of the camera forming a square are four buttons – the menu button, the DPOF print button, the trash button and a display and help button. In the center of the square is a four-way controller labeled for exposure, flash, self-timer and macro modes.

**Left
**The left side of the camera is slightly curved and pretty much blank aside from a small metal lip where the face plate meets the polycarbonate back side.

**Right
**The right side of the 710 has two bolts for the face plate, a recessed strap lug formed from the steel Olympus logo overlay and a plastic hinged covering for the USB, A/V in/out and DC in connections.

**Top
**When you look at the top of the camera, you can see how wedge-shaped it really is. The left side has a beveled plane for a finger grip, and a basic power and shutter button on the middle right side. All the way to the right is another recess in the polycarbonate back for your thumb.

**Bottom
**On the bottom of the camera there’s a sliding door for the optional xD-Picture card and rechargeable li-on battery. There’s also a polycarbonate tripod mount on the bottom.

Components

**Viewfinder
**There’s no optical viewfinder on this slim camera, an increasing trait on most camera models in this class.
**

**
**LCD Screen
**With approximately 115,000 pixels on the 2.5-inch LCD, resolution is merely fair. When panning around, response on the LCD seemed sluggish and movement caused light trails and aberrations to appear on the screen. We’ll test this screen out more fully in a complete review, but for now, we weren’t very impressed. It drives us crazy that screens have gotten larger but, in some cases, pixel counts have stayed the same, resulting in compromised visibility.

**Flash
**At the wide angle, the flash projects to 13.1 ft (4.0 m) and at the long end it throws out to 7.9 feet (2.4 m). Flash modes include Auto (for low and backlight), Red-eye reduction, Fill-in and Off. Like most models in this class, the flash is close to the lens, which will often cause red-eye in portraits.

**Zoom Lens
**The 3x zoom on the 710 extends from 6.5- 19.5mm or 37 to 111mm in 35mm photography. According to Olympus terminology, it’s "seamless" to 15x, or in other words when you combine the 3x optical and the 5x digital you get 15x. Consumers however should be aware that any use of digital zoom will degrade the image and should be avoided in most cases.

Design / Layout

**Model Design / Appearance
**Olympus’ marketing material describes the Stylus 710 as "Designed for Pockets" and that might not be too off base. Slightly wedged shaped, but only just over 3.5" at its thickest point, the 710 is further proof that thin is in. We just wish that the cool metallic front face plate was matched by something more substantial on the backside, which is a polycarbonate that feels plasticy.

**Size / Portability
**If you’ve only seen the Stylus 710 in a brochure or a press photo, you won’t grasp how truly small it is unless you hold it in your hand. Indeed, the Olympus Stylus 710 is one of the smallest and lightest cameras in its class. With dimensions of 3.7" (W) x 2.2" (H) x 0.8" D (94.8mm x 55.9mm x 20.4mm) the 710 definitely feels comfortable in your pocket. And weighing in a just 3.6 ounces (103 grams) without the battery or media card, it’s definitely not going to drag you down.

**Handling Ability
**This model is stylish but not robust. Other small cameras are tiny too but have a stronger, heavier construction and feel like they can be tossed around a bit without harm. The 710, however, is delicate and if you don’t have tiny hands, you’ll feel like you’re holding a dainty teacup when you’re taking a picture.

Also, the 710’s frame and button size is so small it’s difficult to use unless you have small hands and fingers. While not slippery, the wedged shape design of the 710 doesn’t always feel comfortable in your hand. Definitely make sure you hang on to this baby. If you drop it, it’s probably all over.

The one plus about the design is that the indentations in the polycarbonate back have created good places to put your fingers when taking pictures. Overall though, this tiny camera is hard to hold. Theoretically, it should be a one-hander. The shutter button though is not particularly sensitive and the balance of the wedge shape is such that just one hand won’t do. With two hands, however, you feel like your fingers are totally draped over the camera.

**Control Button / Dial Positioning / Size
**Having only the shutter button and the power button on the top is actually a good choice for shooting because it makes things less confusing. The back of the camera, though, is a bit of a mess. The zoom rocker and control dial positioning are fairly traditional. The four-way multi-controller on the bottom with the four small mode buttons (Menu, DPOF, Trash and Display/Help) surrounding it in a square though is not very intuitive.

While it might not be fair to compare this model to some more expensive digital cameras from Nikon and Canon that feature a jog dial, when trying to squeeze so many modes onto the back of a very small camera, dials are definitely the way of the future. Plus, as anyone who owns an iPod knows, they’re a lot of fun to play with.

**Menus
**To be quite frank, the graphical user interface (GUI) on Olympus’ point-and-shoot cameras have always been less than appealing to me. The design of the interface with its blue screen background looks a bit dated, the font choices are weird and not very clear to read and the overall flow of the menus is not intuitive. Though Olympus has made some progress on its GUI in some of its latest models, they still seem a bit stuck in the 8-bit Age.

In the shooting menu, there are five selectable settings, written out and with icons, in a prism formation on a blue swirly background – Image Quality, Setup, SCN (for Scene) and Reset. The playback menu has nine selectable settings represented by icons and written out – Slideshow, Edit, Print Order, Calendar, Playback Menu, Setup, Index, Erase and Album.

In the Scene mode, menus for the different scenes are represented by icons next to descriptions of the scene and what it’s used for. This could be very helpful to beginning users, but most entry level users won’t turn them if they’re buried in a menu. Most people also have trouble making sense of what each icon actually means. At least information is available.

The Guide menus are also helpful, giving users basic information on how to blur the background in a shot, for instance. We’re all for anything that helps educate the user so they have a better experience taking pictures. Again though, whether people will actually explore these guides is debatable.

In movie mode, the menu presents the user with resolution options. See the Movie Mode section for more details.

**Ease of Use
**The Olympus Stylus 710 is certainly not difficult to use in its basic shooting mode, but it’s also not totally intuitive. The menu system is a bit dated looking and takes some time to figure out how to navigate. Having a mode on the dial that actually says "Guide" is a great choice since it doesn’t force the user to struggle through menus to find it. The overall tiny design of the camera though is hard for anyone with large or even average-sized hands to use. We love the fact that the cameras are getting smaller, but is it necessary to sacrifice usability?

Modes

**Auto Mode
**Auto mode, symbolized by the small black camera icon on the control dial, turns over total control to the camera – which adjusts shutter speed, aperture, ISO and all the basics. There is some limited manual control within the menus including ISO adjustment, metering, exposure compensation and white balance, but this is not a camera for people who like to "drive stick."

**Movie Mode
**The Olympus 710 records QuickTime Movies with sound in three formats – SHQ at 640 x 480 at 15 frames per second, HQ at 320 x 240 at 15 frames per second and SQ at 160 x 120 at 15 frames per second. Not having any movie mode that shoots at 30 fps is a bad move by Olympus. An argument can be made that the level of user that might buy a 710 isn’t so interested in shooting movies, but then why put such a mode on there in the first place? And if you put it on, why have it only at a flickering 15 fps level? If users are already not so keen on movies, 15 fps will put the final nail in the coffin.

**Drive / Burst Mode
**The Olympus Stylus 710 offers high speed sequential shooting at 3.7 fps at up to 11 frames in HQ mode and 1.1 frames per second for up to six frames in SQ mode. Not a lot of range there, but this camera is not exactly meant for sports photojournalists.

**Playback Mode
**Playback mode offers a basic slideshow feature, some editing features including cropping, a feature for indexing your shots (in fours, nines, 16, or 25 shots), an enlargement zoom feature that lets you check out an image of up to 10x magnification, image rotation, a calendar, an album and a histogram. Users may also resize and rotate pictures, and fix red-eye.

**Custom Image Presets
**There are many shooting presets on the 710 – Portrait, Landscape, Landscape + portrait, Night Scene, Night + Portrait, Sport, Indoor, Candle, Self Portrait, Available Light Portrait, Sunset, Fireworks, Museum, Cuisine, Behind Glass, Documents, Auction, Shoot & Select1, Shoot and Select2, Beach, Snow, Under Water Wide1, Under Water Wide2, Under Water Macro and Digital Image Stabilization Mode. Phew. This should be more than enough for anyone, except for maybe die-hard Casio fans who aren’t happy unless their compacts can offer over 30 scene presets.

Control Options

**Manual Control Options
**The Stylus 710, being primarily a style camera, features very little manual control. There are some ways to adjust ISO, exposure and metering, but to access most of them the user must wheel through menus. One of the buttons of the four-way controller does access the exposure compensation feature.

**Focus
***Auto Focus
*The 710 uses Olympus’ super high-refractive-index lens elements designed for digital cameras. Translation – this lens itself isn’t half bad. The focus system uses CCD Contrast Detection and the user can pick from four preset focus ranges–Normal mode: 23.6" – infinity, Macro Mode Wide: 7.9" – to infinity, Macro Mode Tele: 19.7" – to infinity, and Super Macro mode: 3.2" – 23.6". There are also two focus modes, iESP auto and Spot AF.

The autofocus worked fine on the mixed lighting of the convention hall floor; it wasn’t especially fast or slow—merely average. Check back soon for a full review, where we will explore the camera’s autofocus capabilities in low light and low contrast scenes.

*Manual Focus
*There are no actual "manual" focus options on the 710. The user can also choose from the four pre-sets mentioned in the previous section – Normal mode, Macro Mode Wide, Macro Mode Tele and Super Macro Mode—but that’s hardly the same thing.

**Metering
**There are two options for metering on the 710 – Digital ESP multi-pattern and spot metering. For the price, we expected a center-weighted option as well.

**Exposure
**Like most digital cameras in this class, the 710 allows adjustments of exposure from -2 to +2 EV in 1/3 steps.

**White Balance
**White balance defaults to auto but the user can pick from six pre-sets – daylight, overcast, tungsten, fluorescent1, fourescent2 and fluorescent3. A manual option would have been welcome, and at this price point including it is not uncommon.

**ISO
**ISO ranges on the 710 from 64 to 800. There’s also a 1600 "equivalent" which we’ll explore more fully in a follow-up complete review. The user can, of course, also set the ISO to auto and let the camera decide.

**Aperture
**Aperture ranges on the 710 from f/3.4 to f/5.7 but is not selectable by the user.

**Shutter Speed
**Shutter speeds on the Stylus 710 span from 1/1000 sec. – 1/2 sec. (extending to 4 sec. in Night Scene Mode) and are not manually selectable by the user.

Image Parameters

**Picture Quality / Size Options
**Resolution can be adjusted on the 710 in eight different parameters – a good number for a camera of any class. While it’s fine to offer such variety, we wonder if anyone ever actually uses so many sizes, especially with the ability of programs such as Photoshop to resize pictures into just about any size. Resolution adjustments on the 710 are as follows: SHQ/HQ at 3072 x 2304 pixels, SQ1 at 2569 x 1920, another SQ1 at 2304 x 1728, still another SQ1 at 2048 x 1536, SQ2 at 1600 x 1200, another SQ2 at 1280 x 960, a third SQ2 at 1024 x 768, and a final SQ2 at 640 x 480.

**Picture Effects Mode
**Automatic Pixel Mapping (APM) is available in the menu, and there are several playback edit features for digital stills and movies. For stills, there are black & white and sepia, with adjustment of brightness and saturation. Users can add frames and titles. For movies, there’s a frame index effect.

Connectivity / Extras

**Connectivity
***Software
*The 710 comes with the standard Olympus software, Olympus Master. The software is for downloading images to a computer (though you can do it without the software with a card reader) and helps search for images by date or keyword in the Calendar View. Editing is available in the software, including one-click red-eye reduction and other basic retouching effects. The software

also helps access online Olympus support, templates, firmware upgrades and other services.

*Jacks, Ports, Plugs
*The 710 has a multi-terminal connector on its right side under a plastic covering for USB, audio/video output and DC input. The camera auto-connects via USB 2.0 full speed.

*Direct Print Options
*The Stylus 710, like just about every camera on the market, can connect to a PictBridge-enabled printer for direct printing without a computer. Printing is a one-touch feature from the 710.

*Battery
*The 710 uses a Li-Ion rechargeable battery (Li-40B/Li-42B). CIPA rating for this battery was not available, though we can say our earlier testing of the Stylus 800 suggested poor battery life.

*Memory
*The camera includes 19 MB of internal memory, which is part of a recent trend to return internal memory to cameras. I suspect it’s mostly for dealers, who can now let their customers try out cameras without having to worry about memory cards being stolen. But even if it is designed to benefit dealers, having a shot or two’s worth of internal memory can help out in a pinch.

Overall Impressions

**Value
**At $349.99, the Stylus 710 is in the middle to slightly higher-end price range for a 7 MP compact camera these days. While the 710 has an all-weather design, the new Bright Capture Technology and a Digital Image Stabilization Mode, all features that are basically exclusive to Olympus, some of its other features, such as a lower resolution screen and a body that is actually less than half metallic, put it a notch below competitive models from other leading manufacturers.

If you like cameras that are small and light, though, the Stylus definitely has that in spades. We, however, wonder how durable this model will be over the long haul and question the quality of images attained using the camera’s higher sensitivities (ISO 800 and 1600). Since this is only a First Impression review, we’ll reserve judgment on that until we can examine durability and image quality issues more closely.

**Who It’s For
***Point-and-Shooters –* This slim little camera seems solidly aimed at the point-and-shoot crowd, particularly those who wants a camera light enough to forget about.

Budget Consumers – To put the large 7 MP chip and some advanced features into a camera so small costs a little extra. Those on a budget would probably want to consider a less svelte model.
*Gadget Freaks – *Aside from some of the new technology such as Bright Capture and Digital Image Stabilization, there are not a lot of unique features on the 710 to satiate the gadget freak.

*Manual Control Freaks – *There is very little manual control on this model, but then again, it’s aimed towards first-time users.

*Pros / Serious Hobbyists – *Advanced features are in short supply on the 710. Unless they really want something extra that’s small and light, pros and serious hobbyists won’t be interested.

Conclusion

**Conclusion
**The Stylus line has had a glorious history for Olympus. Beginning with the original Stylus film cameras to the more recent digital Stylus models with their unique all-weather bodies, this line has been an Olympus tradition for many years. While not exactly a misstep, the new Stylus 710 doesn’t seem much like a step forward either. Some new technologies such as Bright Capture and Digital Image Stabilization are potentially interesting additions, but are obviously not suited to all shooting situations. Is the Stylus 710 distinct enough to separate itself from a very crowded field of digital point-and-shoots? While the jury’s still officially out until actual testing on this model can take place, the only thing it has going for it so far is its light weight, and if this is all it offers, we suspect it could get lost in the shuffle.