The Olympus Tough TG-850 ($249.99) features a couple of firsts for a rugged compact camera: a 21mm wide-angle lens and a tilting rear display. It's rated for use in water as deep as 33 feet and can survive drops from heights of 7 feet, and has a Super Macro mode that lets you get up close and personal with tiny photographic subjects. Its low cost comes with some trade-offs; there's no Wi-Fi or GPS, images are a little bit too noisy for our tastes, and it lacks the wide-aperture f/2 lens found in our Editors' Choice, the Olympus Tough TG-2. But you can save about $100 by opting for the TG-850, and it's worth your consideration if those aren't must-have features.
Design and Features
The TG-850 follows the same design paradigm as most tough cameras; the lens is located in the top left corner, and is protected by a flat front port so it doesn't extend while zooming. There are a few models that buck this trend, placing the lens in the center; the Pentax WG-3 GPS is one. The TG-850 measures 2.5 by 4.3 by 1.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.7 ounces. That's about par for the course in this class; the Pentax is wider than others (2.5 by 4.9 by 1.3 inches) and just a bit heavier at 8.1 ounces.
The 5x zoom lens sets itself apart from other rugged cameras due to its wide-angle field of view. It covers a 21mm (full-frame equivalent) at the wide end, zooming to 105mm at its telephoto extreme. Its aperture starts at f/3.5 at the wide end and drops to f/5.7 at 105mm. The wide-angle design is especially good news for underwater shooters, as shooting through water narrows a camera's field of view. At its widest angle the lens can focus on objects just about 2.3 inches away from its front element, but there's also a Super Macro mode that zooms the lens in a bit. Focus is possible just a few centimeters from the lens in that mode.
On the top plate you'll find the power button, shutter release, and a zoom rocker. Rear controls include a movie record button, a mode dial, playback and delete controls, the Menu button, and a four-way rocker with a center OK button; it includes Info, flash output, and drive mode buttons. There's also an overlay menu that runs across the right side of the display; tapping the left direction on the four-way controller activates it. Its contents change based on the shooting mode, but in Program you have the fullest set of options: color output, flash settings, exposure compensation, White Balance, ISO, drive mode, image resolution, and image aspect ratio.
There are no manual shooting modes available—you can't take direct control over the aperture or shutter speed. If you want to cede all control to the TG-850 you can place it in iAuto, and there are the requisite Art Filter and Scene modes available on the dial. In-camera panorama stitching is supported, and Olympus has placed a couple of special shooting modes directly on the dial. Hand-Held Starlight is designed to capture blur-free images in very dim conditions, and e-Portrait smooths skin tones of subjects for more pleasurable viewing on an HDTV.
The rear display is a 3-inch LCD with a 460k-dot resolution. In a first for a rugged camera, it is mounted on a hinge so that it swings up to face all the way forward. It's adequately sharp, but not as pleasant to look at as the 610k-dot OLED that Nikon uses in its Coolpix AW110. The display's 16:9 aspect ratio is wider than the 4:3 images that the TG-850 captures at its native aspect ratio, but you can change the settings to shoot photos at 16:9, 3:2, or 1:1 if you prefer a different field of view, and HD movies are captured at the HDTV-friendly 16:9 ratio.
The camera is rated for underwater use at depths of up 33 feet, and to survive drops from heights of 7 feet. Olympus also states that it's crushproof to 220 pounds of force, and freezeproof to 14°F. The camera survived dozens of drops, with its screen placed in various positions, and came through like a champ. It also had no problems shooting when completely submerged, although I wasn't able to take any deeper than the kitchen sink. Other tough cameras are rated to be used deeper underwater; Nikon's mirrorless 1 AW1 can be used in water as deep as 49 feet.
Many other tough cameras have GPS, including the appropriately named Pentax WG-3 GPS, but it's absent from the TG-850. Also missing is Wi-Fi, so there's no way to quickly transfer photos to your smartphone for online sharing. You can use an Eyefi Mobi card to add that functionality if you need it, but by the time you spend extra money on the card, you should consider moving up to a model with integrated Wi-Fi like the new Olympus TG-3 ($349.99).
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