Olympus mju 1030 SW Review

Good review. I bought the camera on the strength of it, and I am very impressed. I've just been on holiday in the Caribbean, and the camera performed pretty much faultlessly. I took some great pictures snorkelling, and it's good to have a camera you can slob around with on the beach and not worry about sand getting into the works. It's also pretty much kid-proof. The only two negative comments are (1) I ran out of battery power one day: I think I must have left it switched on by accident, and didn't have the power saving mode enabled. Once I enabled power saving mode, it was fine; and (2) it may be fussy about third party memory cards. The supplied XD card worked fine, as did a Veho 4GB micro SD card which I popped in the supplied XD-micro SD adapter. A Kingston 4GB micro SD card was not so happy, however, and I kept on getting "contacts dirty" errors. I wouldn't hold this against the camera, though. The bottom line is that, for beach-holiday snapping, it's pretty much unbeatable. Even torch mode was invaluable when I needed to pick my way across an unlit beach in the dark.

Great litle camera so far but the video recording time was bugging me as its only 10 secs in VGA 30fps. Then I got this from customer services when asked why 10secs:

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There are no technical reasons but law restriction.

The reason for the limited video length in our newly released cameras are the criteria for customs classification, reinterpreted since November by EU.

The Tariff and Statistical Nomenclature Section of the EU Customs Code Committee now resolved on following criteria for customs classification:

Cameras that comply with following relating criteria are no longer free of duty:

• video recording capability of minimum 30 minutes for one sequence
• resolution of 800 x 600 pixels or more
• frame rate of 23 fps or more.

Cameras with these 3 features will be classified under Code 8525 80 91 in the future and subjected to customs duty. The tax rate here is 12,9% (and it would surely affect prices)

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Anyone know if this applies to all countries, possiblity of getting it to last longer by putting another countries software on the camera.

This firmware update allows full 640x480 30fps to the capacity of the card http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/29_digital_camera_firmware_update_mju_1030sw_19223.htm
as long as you buy olympus cards of course.
Can't decide between this camera and the new m tough-6000 which is only shockproof not crushproof but has more features.