Tough guy

Tough guy

This one’s for Kate, who asked if anyone has a camera like her new one (a Nikon Coolpix W300) and what they did with it. And this made me think about the Olympus TG-5 I bought a few years ago, because my local studio has a swimming pool, and my Nikonos V is quite unwieldy and expensive to feed. The Olympus series have tended to get top ratings in group tests, but I suspect that all of the similar cameras are rather similar in every way (Fuji and Canon also make tough, waterproof models).



What I don’t like is the absence of an eye-level viewfinder, the higher ISO performance, and the general lack of control – there are only three aperture settings, wide open, nearly wide open, and stopped down a lot. The exact aperture varies as you zoom: at the shortest setting, f/2, f/2.8 and f/8 are available.



Putting this in context, underwater, conventional viewfinders are useless, but armslength operation on land still feels wrong to me, as well as actually being less stable. I’m working on an elbows-in stance that still allows me to see the screen, but a proper viewfinder remains essential for me, really. The very short focal lengths involved (4.5mm to 18mm) mean that depth of field is always decent.



Getting the camera out to carry it around for the day, I discovered that there are plenty of things I didn’t know about setting it. These range from the weird symbol for macro mode (a microscope, instead of the usual tulip, and on the mode dial instead of on the 4-way buttons) to how to lock focus (half-press the shutter release and press the OK button). I imagine that there are similar issues for similar models, and that you, too, can find solutions from YouTube – I found mine from Robin Dobb of Backscatter.



This highlights one of the things about any compact – that you will probably be much happier using one if you are used to Program mode, and not interested in differential focus. Also, that the subtleties of the controls may not be at all obvious in the way that they are with mirrorless and DSLR bodies. For simplicity and cost reasons, there are relatively few buttons, and many things are done through the menus, often a layer or two down, so that scrolling through the menu won’t necessarily tell you what you want to find out.



The quality is surprisingly good, I found. Keep away from the tricky areas, and it can go very well indeed. A point worth noting from my YouTube research is that using the central focus area beats the wider area, especially underwater: this may or may not apply to other brands, but the inaccuracies of focus-and-recompose will be eaten up by the enormous depth of field, even at maximum aperture.