Alas, I have made peace with my Olympus Tough 8000 camera. After pretty much bashing its usage in my own review, I’ve found a way to use this camera to my liking while taking advantage of its unique “Tough” qualities.
This is now the camera that comes with me when I go out for a party or a late night. I don’t have to worry about stuff spilling on it or it accidentally getting dropped on the floor. And full-auto mode works perfectly fine indoors since the camera generally just fires off its flash anyway. When going for a non-flash picture, or on rare occasions when I take this around with me on an afternoon stroll, I turn it to P mode and operate it pretty much in ISO-priority mode. By controlling the ISO, I can insure that the camera-selected shutter speed is sufficient for a non-blurred picture. Finally (and this was my key realization), at higher ISOs there’s a lot of noise, for sure, but by converting the high-ISO pictures to black and white you actually get quite nice results!
100% crop of noise @ ISO800 and this is already taken at a lower resolution of 2560x1920
Original pic @ ISO800, washed out colors & noisy
Converts beautifully to black & white!
