Olympus Stylus 9000 12 MP Digital Camera with 10x Wide Angle Optical Dual Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.7-Inch LCD (Black): Customer Reviews & Product Details

10 X optical zoom + digital zoom for viewing - Takes great pictures and videos

very good buy I do not regret, excellent pictures, I be inaccuracies with the quality of the pictures both day and night very good easy to use, the zoom incredible, really recommend it 100%, as I've had to olympus olympus cameras above and the service is good anywhere in the world, atleast here in Venezuela

This is an excellent camera even though its a point and shoot. It has 12 mega pixels and a good zoom which is one of the reasons i bought this camera. I also bought this camera because it has an in-camera panorama feature. I later found out that it also does a grant job with up close pictures like flowers and such. it has three shooting settings for it in case you want to get really close like i do: normal, macro, and super-macro. i didn't even know it had this feature and once i discovered it i started getting compliments on my photos.

I am just a snap happy picture taker who likes an ultra-small camera with quick shutter speed. I returned the Olympus after evaluating picture quality with the zoom, and because I did not like the feel of the camera in my hand. The Olympus picture quality is excellent until you get beyond 8x zoom; the blurring around the edges is very noticeable even while taking the shot, and the colors fade. The camera felt bulky and heavy compared to the Lumix FH20, and is more expensive. Overall a beautiful camera, just not right for my type of picture taking.

A side note about the Olympus brand; they design their battery and memory cards so you cannot substitue a generic brand.

I've had my Olympus Stylus-9000 for a little over a year. Recently some smallish issues have compounded to make the camera basically unusable. First, the good stuff: I love the 10x optical zoom. When I bought the camera, there was really nothing that compared to that in it's price range. Outdoor and low-light, slow-speed pictures come out great. I never had any problems with battery life. I took it on a two week vacation; I zoomed in and out and turned the camera on and off all day long and only had to charge the battery twice. The controls are straightforward and the size makes it perfect to stuff in your jeans pocket.

Now the bad: first and foremost, the camera (or at least mine) simply isn't durable. I had the camera for a little over a year (just long enough to pass the warranty period, natch) and developed a few problems that gradually evolved into major problems. The LCD screen (which I thought was great originally) developed a jittery static problem that was only intermittent at first. Eventually this got worse and worse until now the screen is rarely visible and I have to take pictures "blind". Also, whatever feature it was that was providing the stabilization for zoomed in pictures stopped working, which makes the 10x zoom pretty much useless unless you have something to rest the camera on. Someone else mentioned this and I agree: the camera does not take good indoor pictures. Using the iAuto function, you get pictures that are overflashed; there seems to be no mechanism to correlate flash strength with subject distance. Switching to manual mode will eventually get you a decent picture, but who wants to tweek settings when the auto feature should be doing that for you? Flash free indoor pictures (which I resorted to after the overflashing) are grainy and the image stabilization does not do much if anything to correct the natural blur that comes with hand held low shutter speed pics.

In short, my camera broke. After reading the reviews here, this doesn't seem to be a common problem; maybe I just have bad luck. If I were happy with the camera overall, I would certainly be willing to buy another of the same model, but I am not. The camera simply isn't that great. I will be buying a differnt camera this time around.