Olympus Mju Mini Digital
(Olympus Stylus Verve in the USA)
Review Date: February 7th 2005
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Features
The Olympus Mju Mini Digital has a 4.23 megapixel, 1/2.5 inch CCD that delivers 4.0 effective megapixels. There are 7 image quality/size settings available (SHQ, HQ, SQ1, SQ2 (which has 4 different settings)), which are recorded as JPEGs. There are no RAW or TIFF formats. The camera's 2x optical zoom lens is equivalent to a 35–70mm lens on a 35mm format camera. There is also a 4x digital zoom should you feel the need to use it. The camera supports xD-Picture Card memory cards. The camera is available in a 6 different colours - Jewellery Silver, Pure White, Cosmic Black, Crystal Blue, Velvet Red, Copper Orange - to suit your taste. The Olympus Mju Mini Digital is weatherproof in the sense that it is not damaged by water spray from any direction.
This camera offers a Program auto exposure mode and 13 different scene modes (Portrait, Night Scene, Self Portrait, Self Portrait and Self Timer, Beach and Snow, Cuisine, Indoor, Landscape, Landscape with Portrait, Behind Glass, Candle, Sunset, Fireworks). The maximum aperture is f3.5 at wide-angle and f4.9 at telephoto, and the shutter speed range is 4 secs. – 1/1000 sec. There are 4 ISO speeds ranging from 64 to 400 and an Auto option. There are 3 different focusing modes available - iESP autofocus, spot autofocus and AF lock. There are 4 different White Balance presets to choose from (tungsten, overcast, sunlight, fluorescent light), plus an Auto setting. The camera offers exposure compensation in ± 2 in 1/3 EV stops. there are no auto-bracketing options. The Olympus Mju Mini Digital offers 2 different auto-exposure metering options - Digital ESP and spot.
The Olympus Mju Mini Digital has a normal shooting mode, self-timer and a high-speed mode which allows you take up to 7 images at 1.3 frames per second in SHQ mode. There is also a Panorama mode, enabling you to take a number of shots and stitch them together to form one large image, plus a 2 in 1 mode. There are a number of different effects that you can apply to an image after it has been taken (re-size, rotation, black & white, sepia, fisheye, softfocus). The Macro setting allows you to focus on subjects that are as close as 8cms away from the camera. The built-in flash offers a range of different modes; Auto (automatic activation in low and backlight), red-eye reduction, fill-in (forced activation) and off (no flash). The working distance at ISO 100 at the wide angle lens setting is 2.8m, and at the telephoto setting 2.0m. The flash typically takes 5 seconds to recharge and it has a guide number of 5.4.
To compose your images, you can only use the LCD monitor. There is no optical viewfinder. The Olympus Mju Mini Digital has a 1.8 inch colour TFT LCD monitor which has 134,000 pixels and 160° wide view angle. The Olympus Mju Mini Digital can record movies with sound at 2 settings; 320x240 pixels and 160x120 pixels. This is recorded in the QuickTime Motion JPEG format. As well as recording movies, the Olympus Mju Mini Digital also doubles up as a voice recorder, allowing you record sound in the WAVE format. PictBridge support allows direct printing with compatible printers, and the DPOF feature allows you to configure options for printing your images.
The camera's dimensions are 95mm (W) x 55.5mm (H) x 27.5mm (D), and it weighs 115g without the battery and storage card fitted. The camera is powered by either one rechargeable lithium ion battery. There is a plastic tripod mount in the bottom-left of the camera.
Finally, the standard box kit contains a camera strap, 16 MB xD-Picture Card, USB cable, audio/video cable, rechargeable battery, charger, and the OLYMPUS Master 1.0 software. You will need to budget for a couple of xD-Picture Card, as the supplied 16Mb card can only store 5 images at the best quality setting of SHQ.
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PhotographyBLOG is a member of the DIWA organisation. Our test results for the Olympus Mju Mini Digital have been submitted to DIWA for comparison with test results for different samples of the same camera model supplied by other DIWA member sites.