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).
The SP-100's lens covers a 24-1,200mm (full-frame equivalent) field of view, so you can capture wide vistas and zoom in to lock in on tiny details in a scene. The aperture opens to f/2.9 at the wide end of the lens and closes to f/6.5 when zoomed all the way in. Most superzooms have variable aperture lenses. A notable exception is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200, which uses the same 1/2.3-inch sensor size as the SP-100. Its 24x (25-600mm) zoom range isn't as long, but is suitable for most situations short of serious wildlife photography.Olympus places the bulk of the controls on the right side, but there are a few on the left side of the lens barrel. There's a zoom rocker and the Autofocus Lock/Focus Limiter button. A press locks the autofocus at the current distance, and holding it down for a second brings up a menu that sets the autofocus system to search through its entire range for focus, or limit it to only look at close or far objects. The release catches for the flash and the red-dot sight framing assist system are also on the left, directly underneath the pop-up flash.
To the right of the flash on the top plate there's a mode dial, a control dial, the power button, and the shutter release/zoom rocker. The silver shutter release is just a bit larger than average, which gives it a little wobble when half-pressed to lock focus. But I didn't find it disconcerting in the least and found it was easy to depress fully, even if my finger wasn't perfectly centered. Right behind the mode dial, on the angled top section of the rear, there's a button to toggle between the rear LCD and EVF, and the programmable Fn button. I set it as an ISO adjustment, but you can also set it to adjust the color settings, white balance, image size, aspect ratio, autofocus mode, metering pattern, image stabilization mode, or movie image size. It can also be used to engage manual focus, set the focus limit, or magnify a portion of the frame to check focus.The remainder of the controls are on the rear face, to the right of the LCD. These include image playback and delete buttons, the movie record button, and the Menu and Info buttons. There's a four-way joypad with a center OK control. Each of its positions has a function, and it's best to familiarize yourself with them because they are only indicated by engraved text that's near impossible to read in dim conditions. The top direction engages exposure compensation, the right adjusts the flash output, and the bottom changes the drive mode. Tapping left launches the overlay menu that runs down the right side of the rear LCD.From the overlay menu, you can adjust most of the settings you'll want to access when taking pictures. These include the color output, flash output, exposure compensation, white balance, ISO, drive mode, image size and aspect ratio, video quality, or jump into the more detailed camera menu.
The rear display is 3 inches in size and features a 460k-dot resolution. It's fixed and doesn't support touch input, but is perfectly adequate. You can spend more money on a camera with a sharper display; the Fuji FinePix S1 has a vari-angle 921k-dot screen, and the premium Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX10 uses a tilting 1,228k-dot screen. There's an EVF; it's plenty sharp thanks to a 921k-dot resolution, which is noticeably sharper than the 201k-dot EVF utilized by the Samsung WB2200F. A wheel to the left of the EVF adjusts the diopter.The red dot sight framing assist system comes in handiest when you're using the EVF to frame. When activated, a reticle appears in a window that sits directly above the eyecup. When you're zoomed in, you can quickly raise your eye from the EVF and center the reticle on your subject. There's a wheel to adjust the dot's position to the right of the EVF, so you can tune it to match your eyesight.
Unlike most new cameras, the SP-100 doesn't have Wi-Fi. If you're not interested in sharing images while on the go, this isn't a major concern. You can opt for a camera with Wi-Fi; the Fuji S1 has it built in. You can also use an Eye-Fi Mobi if you'd like to transfer images directly to your phone while you're in the field, but it won't add the remote viewfinder option that cameras with built-in Wi-Fi offer.
