Olympus Stylus Tough-8010

The Olympus Stylus Tough-8010 does indeed live up to its name, experts say: It adds "crushproof" to the usual litany of rugged qualities you'll find on competing cameras (it withstands 220 pounds of pressure). Some top experts included it on their best lists for its toughness alone, but they get better photos and videos from the top-rated Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS3 (*Est. $280) ; the Panasonic isn't crushproof, but it does closely match the Olympus's waterproof, freezeproof and drop-proof specs.

The Tough-8010 offers a slightly longer optical zoom than the TS3 -- 5x versus 4.6x -- and both allow you to use the optical zoom while shooting HD video (full HD for the Panasonic, but the Olympus stops at 720p). Both cameras have HDMI jacks, so you can hook them up to your TV to watch your clips in HD. But despite the Tough-8010's 14-megapixel sensor and 28 mm to 140 mm lens, critics say photo quality is perhaps a little bit worse than its predecessor, the Stylus Tough-8000, with complaints of fuzzy focus and noisy low-light images, especially visible on enlarged photos (experts say small snapshots tend to look fine). The Stylus Tough 8010 is also slower than its predecessor, taking four seconds or more between shots, a pace that testers find frustrating. Some owners at Amazon.com give the camera 1 star (out of 5) for this reason, while others complain that the camera broke when they took it underwater. Overall, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS3 gets much better reviews, and it costs less.

Exhaustive tests at the enthusiast sites Imaging-Resource.com and Steves-Digicams.com both find some important flaws with the Olympus Stylus Tough-8010, but both recommend it anyway for its sheer ruggedness. Reviews at DigitalCamera-HQ.com and CNET are shorter but still thorough, and they come to similar conclusions -- as do many owners who post reviews for this camera at Amazon.com.