best Olympus digicams

The XZ-1 has filled its shoes admirably, letting me take low light photos without flash that amaze my friends due to its incredibly fast lens.

On the digital zoom...my previous experience with digital zooms has taught me never, ever to trust them so when my friend Nathan, who carries his SZ-30 everywhere too and recommended it to me in the first place, showed me how well it worked on this lovely, compact little Olympus my jaw might actually have dropped.

I love the viewfinder, a must for us older guys.

The fast lens produced much higher quality pictures than the fujis I tried.

It's an "OK" point and shoot with a long optical zoom, after that it's less than satisfactory for me.

The Olympus SP-810UZ is a new ultra-zoom digital compact camera with a large 36x optical zoom, 24mm wide-angle view and 14 megapixel resolution.

Well, the fast lens is nice but it's not the only f/2 waterproofer (which a lot of people say it is) - the Pentax WG-3 also has the f/2 lens.

The lens is not crisply sharp at any focal length: at the wide end there is noticeable softening of the image around the edges; the lens performs pretty well in the low to mid-range of the zoom but image quality at the far end of the zoom is equivalent to a cheap telephoto, with quite a bit of chromatic aberration.

It was easy to use, click once, move the camera (up, down, left, right) and line up the dots.