Olympus Mju Tough 6010

Disposable film cameras are useful if you want to take pictures in locations where a standard camera might get damaged.

Since throwaway digital cameras are yet to arrive, the Mju Tough 6010 might be the next-best thing.

Its metal casing (in a choice of red, blue or grey) and watertight rubber seals ensure it can withstand a dive to three metres deep, accidental drops from 1.5 metres in height and temperatures as low as -10°C.

The pocket-sized 12-megapixel, camera has a 3.6x optical zoom lens (equivalent to 28-102mm on a film camera). It powered up in just a couple of seconds and felt solid when gripped in the palm despite weighing just 149g without its rechargeable battery. The shiny surfaces, however, meant that getting a firm hold on the camera’s body was sometimes difficult.

This is a shame, as one constant problem we found was the soft images caused by camera shake. It uses two kinds of image-stabilisation technology but this did not help much.

While it looks the part from the front, a set of disappointingly small, plastic controls accompany the 2.7in screen at the rear.

Luckily, then, for anyone operating the camera with wet fingers or gloves, it also offers something called tap control. Once this has been switched on using a menu option, it’s possible to tap the screen to retrieve or scroll through saved pictures as well as operate other important functions. It was fast and surprisingly responsive, and worked well for us.

Further user-friendliness comes in the shape of a mode that compares scenes with information the camera already knows about and adjusts the settings to suit. All the user then has to do is to point and shoot.

It can record video too: a pre-record mode allows action to be pre-empted, though the resolution is a standard and disappointing 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second when we would have expected high-definition footage at this price.

In terms of still image quality we were disappointed by the camera’s unpredictable white balance and the noise visible on pictures taken in low-light conditions.

More positively, the camera was fun and easy to use, and image quality is still quite reasonable.