Olympus - mju DIGITAL 600 review

Digital cameras are so widespread these days that it can be tough to differentiate between those on offer. This is very apparent if you have between £200 and £300 to spend, as the market is awash with options.

Olympus has just added to your worries in this respect with its mju / µ (pronounced 'mew') DIGITAL 600, which, as you might gather from the latter part of the name, offers you a healthy six megapixels of image snapping capability.

For those of you fed up with silver digital cameras, you may be pleased to know that the mju DIGITAL 600 comes in (navy) blue and (ruby) red as well as (Arctic) silver. However, you are probably going to want to chose your camera on the basis of more than just its colour...

The first thing of note about the mju DIGITAL 600 in terms of operation is its massive LCD screen. The specifications rate it at measuring 6.4cm across the diagonal, though in fact the viewing area is closer to 6cm. This is still a whole lot more than we are used to in a digital camera, and it makes framing shots a dream.

There are two elements of bad news though: the LCD takes up almost all of the space on the back of the camera, leaving no room for an optical viewfinder, and the control buttons have a relatively small area in which to live, so they do feel a little squished. If you have large fingers you may find them a little difficult to manage.

Many of the extras are fairly standard. There is a 3x optical zoom, with 5x digital to supplement it if you don't mind sacrificing image quality. There are macro and super macro shooting modes, the latter allowing you to shoot at as little as 7cm from your subject. And you can control things like white balance and ISO settings with just a couple of button presses.

For those who prefer presets, there are 23 scene shooting modes. Choosing these is really simple. There's a button dedicated to choosing the mode; press this then scroll. A short description of each mode helps you make a selection.

The offerings include sport, behind glass, documents, beach and snow, and reducing blur. Some of the modes are oddly named - e.g. the still life mode is called 'cuisine', while others are designed for very specific purposes, e.g. auction mode, which, says the description, 'captures three pictures sequentially at different exposures in the appropriate size for e-auction.' Ebayers go wild.

Along with all this is BrightCapture technology, designed to improve the quality of images shot in low light conditions. It also fiddles with the brightness of the LCD so you can frame your shots easily. There is more than one shooting mode that uses this; available light portrait, indoors and night scene. The latter, as an example of how these modes work, slows the shutter speed down to allow more light into the lens. If you shoot indoors with the flash and get the dreaded red-eye, try the red-eye fixing option which helps remove 'demon-eyes'.

The mju DIGITAL 600 has 8MB of internal memory and supports xD picture cards. You'll need to invest quickly as you don't get any supplied with the camera and you can only store two images at the highest quality on that 8MB.