This week we managed to get out paws on an Olympus Stylus Verve or Olympus Mju Mini Digital depending on which side of the pond you are to review.  Many of you may be familiar with the Mju 400 of which the stylus verve is a close cousin, but there the family traits begin and end, the stylus verve is a very small pocket able unit.

Available in a range of colours from shocking red to cool blue the verve wins the title of mini digital camera the moment you open the box, weighing only 115 grams (that's lighter than many mobile phones and measuring 95mm x 55.5mm x 27.5mm it fits nicely in a pocket or bag. But despite its miniature size the Olympus Stylus Verve packs a full set of features.

The 4.0 mega pixel 1/2.5 type (0.4 type) CCD chip captures excellent some would say crisp images, the colour reproduction is nothing if not lively, perhaps a little too full on for some tastes but for us it s refreshing change from some of the duller colour reproductions you get from some unnamed manufacturers. The optics are only a 2 times zoom which is a bit of a shame but we guess that space is at a premium but we would have liked a 4 times at least, there is a 4 times digital zoom which Olympus claim is seamless when used in conjunction with the optical zoom. However regular readers will know our loathing of digital zoom so lets just leave it at that.

Operating the Stylus Verve is we have to say a joy, the 1.8 inch, 134,000 pixel screen claims to have one of the best viewing angles available. There's no need to line your self up dead on just to see the image and the brightness of the display and definition are very good for such a small package. This is just as well as there is no optical viewfinder on the stylus unit which we are told is made from a single sheet of metal formed to give you the wonderful curves of the stylus verve.

Images captured on the unit can be quite sizeable for example the top rate of 2272 x 1704 will make some pretty hefty Jpegs which will quickly fill up the miserly 16mb (5 shot) xD picture card supplied as standard, so yet another instant upgrade required but a 512mb picture card will set you back £52 with Amazon so its not too bad. Of course that meatier picture card will allow you to play with the Verves movie mode where you can record 15 frame per second 320 x 240 QuickTime movies, its a nice gimmick but then all op the digital cameras seem to offer this now.

A camera of this size will quite rightly attract those who want ease of use and more point and shoot photography, but that doesn't mean we'll accept poor standards, during testing we found the stylus verve to be easy to use in point and shoot mode, with a good focus system which allows for off centre focusing and had a good auto exposure mode. The macro mode allows for settings the standard one can work within 20cm of the target and the super macro will work at 8cm with the flash disabled.

The flash seemed to work well with a few modes including red eye reduction and fill in, it seemed to tail off at around 10 feet and was fairly quick to recharge between shots probably about 5 - 7 seconds.

The Li-30B Li-Ion rechargeable battery lasted us a full 512mb card before it started to show some low battery warnings, we plugged up to the supplied charger while we extracted images using the mini USB B connector, you can also use the inbuilt pict bridge software to print directly to any enabled printer.

Some of our favourite tests for point n shoot cameras revolve around quick shooting and low light, the verve can knock off a shot in about a second and repeat this for 10 shots and as for low light this easily outperformed the Sony T1 and was an equal with the Canon Ixus 500 for working with minimal lighting.

Packaged with a charger, strap, cradle, 16mb picture card and OLYMPUS Master 1.0 software the Olympus Stylus Verve often called the Olympus (Mju) µ-mini digital is a joy to use, it is very small and highly styled offering enough features to make it useful and yet fitting snugly in a pocket. Priced at £199 it should have the likes of Cannon and Pentax more than a little worried in the digital camera race to Christmas.

More Digital Cameras -

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