Review: Olympus SZ-31MR

OLYMPUS SZ-31MR
Specs: 16MP CMOS sensor; 4.5-1.8mm; F6.9, 1/1700 max shutter speed; ISO 6400; Full HD recording; SD card support; 96x combined zoom.
Price: Rs 25,990

The S series cameras from Olympus are meant for travellers and so the idea is to pack in a whole lot of features. And this is exactly what its new SZ-31MR does. Load tonnes of features and specs into an small point-and shoot camera- 16MP CMOS sensor, 24x zoom and Full HD recording.

MULTI-RECORDING
If you click a picture in MR mode, the camera saves two images-the full picture as well as a blowup of a certain section of the picture. For instance, you can click a landscape shot and at the same time have a second picture of a certain element in that frame. This is a unique feature, with the only drawback that it takes some time to frame the area of the second image. But it still saves a lot of time if you are in a rush.

PHOTO WITH CLIP
In this mode the camera records a small clip before and after you shoot an image. Handy if you want make a video log of a trip and intersperse them with images. But these images take a while to save and you need to buy a fast SD card with this camera- we used a 36GB SanDisk Extreme SDHC card for the tests.

MAGIC & BEAUTY
Usually you can edit pictures in different styles. In the Magic mode of this camera, you can pre-decide a picture style even before you shoot. This is different from the scene modes and is more like the filters you would introduce with Photoshop. The Beauty mode, on the other hand, lets you improve the subjects' skin tone and features soon after you have clicked the shot. However, the results were not all that impressive and seemed like a bad editing job. This is the sort of camera that will be SAMSUNG WB 150F, Rs 11,990 ready for anything you ask of it during a long tour.

VERDICT: No flaws; a full manual mode would have been good.

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