Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have had this camera for about 3 days now, and am generally very impressed with it. I bought it for an upcoming canoe trip in Canada, so I wanted something waterproof. I also plan to take it scuba diving to shallow depths. So far I have seen some good, some bad, and some ugly about the camera. Good: * Image quality is excellent, although perhaps a bit too saturated for "normal" mode. * Focus is fast and accurate. * Shutter lag is minimal. Not as fast as my DSLR, but still tolerable. * The "microscope" mode is breathtakingly awesome. I shot a picture of a dish towel and the fibers of the cloth are easily visible. Also I shot one of my phone, and was able to make out not just the pixels but easily see that the pixels are little vertical stripes of red, green and blue. * The water seals are great, although the latching mechanism is a bit fiddly. * The size and weight of the camera are just right. Bad: * The colors are bit over the top. They need to tone down the saturation a little. * Low-light performance is not great. There are some setup options you have to configure to get it to focus at all (ie turn on the AF illuminator) and even then it's very voisy and has soft focus. Enabling the flash fixes all that, of course, but sometimes you don't want to use a flash. * Enabling RAW mode is a bit weird. In most cameras there's a setup menu where you choose compression, image size, and RAW/JPEG but on this camera the compression setting is in the setup and the image size and RAW option are accessed from the main shooting screen. * Manuals are only on the CD -- no printed manual past the one-page quick-start guide * Some of the setup options require a bit of knowledge (e.g. your current altitude for the manometer) or a bit of trouble (GPS setup wants a PC) Ugly: It's possible to insert the battery backwards. No damage to the camera, but it won't turn on or charge. This is the first camera I have seen in nearly 15 years where it's possible to insert the battery incorrectly. Non-standard USB connectors for interface and charging. Seriously, Olympus? Only USB mini or micro should ever appear on a modern device. If not for the battery and USB cable issues, I would give the camera 5 stars...but those two are annoying enough that I have to downgrade it a little.