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Olympus Olympus Tough TG-6 (Black)
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Olympus Olympus Tough TG-6 (Black)
£399.00
Out of stock
Additional information
| Product code | CA50789 |
|---|---|
| Barcode | 4545350052676 |
| Weight | 0000000000001 |
| Brand | Olympus |
40 reviews for Olympus Olympus Tough TG-6 (Black)
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KaSmi –
Early impressions positive
LindainCrete –
Great camera only let down by menu system
Celeste Williams –
Still trying to learn how to use it. At times I think I got it, but then cannot repeat the same thing. The photos that I have managed to get have been excellent. I do seem to be having problems with the little doors for the batter/SD card and the port for recharging. They are difficult even for me with small hands and fingernails.
Stephen Hindmarsh –
Es mi primera camera semi-pro, tiene bastantes funciones, la uso para fotografía Marina es cómoda en la mano, toma muy buenas fotos y lo que más me gusta es que tiene modo macro para los objetos más pequeños. Hay que tener en cuenta que para ir más de 50 pies necesitas una carcasa. Recomendable.
Enry –
I bought if for the toughness and it does not disappoint. In water. Out of water. Anywhere you can imagine!I like it can be handled as a camera as opposed as my gopro. It s easier to handle. More manual settings. And optical zoom is always a plus. It won t be the best picture quality but it s actually better than I expected.In a word a good complementary cam for when your main tool might be better off in a protected case.Bonus point it s not too heavy so a simple floating strap like you find many here avoided me to loose the camera a few times.
A&J Wealth Management –
This camera has great hardware which results in good picture quality and there are many in depth reviews on this subject. Where this camera falls short is on the software front particularly the wifi integration and the usability and functionality of the Olympus mobile apps. Considering the premium price and the convergence in picture quality of point and shoot cameras and cellphones makes this a less than perfect product.
SISTER –
Stop shopping, stop right now. Buy this camera and be done with it. Also, get the underwater housing and a light. That’s it, your underwater camera shopping is complete. The photos speak for themselves! This camera also survived being submerged to 75ft without a housing (not advisable!) but just so are aware that they over engineer it for protection. The macro shots are unlike anything I have ever seen, you can literally put the camera within 1cm of a subject and it will focus perfectly. What a great piece of technology. Buy this, 0 regrets. In the future, I will be purchasing the newer version of this (TG-8?).
Kenneth B. Harrow –
Strengths:Takes good high quality images for a 12 MP compact. Pictures are bright and performance in lowlight is very good. Macro is exceptional and underwater photos are very strong (easily the best among other compact UW cameras). Dynamic range is very good and shadows are often properly exposed (unlike most other UW cameras that consistently underexpose shadows). Despite this camera having only 12 MP, it frequently provides cleaner and more detailed images than its 16 and 20 MP competitors. The custom settings are awesome…everything from the ability to shoot raw, the ability to set and stick 1 second shake reduction timers, to the custom saturation/gradation/contrast/sharpness/nr settings, and much more. White balance tends to be good especially in indoor/macro/uw settings. Reds perform well with this camera. Scenes modes (like beach mode) tend to work well.Weaknesses:Video stabilization is a bit below average but decent and low light videos are brighter than the competition. This cameras is a low floor, high ceiling camera…you will need to learn how to use it to gets best benefits. At times the produced jpgs are too saturated or undersaturated. I find a good work around is program mode > i-enhance (low) with NR (low) which works well in most cases. If you edit raw, you don’t have to worry about that. Blues and greens are a bit weak in distant landscape shots.Minor Quips:A wrist strap is included…good for divers, but for paddlers, skiers, and hikers a neck strap would have been preferred. 4x zoom is a bit below average compared to other UW compacts…but zoom quality isn’t bad and you can always purchased a telephoto addon to double the range. There is no 4k 60p (just 4k 30p or 1080 60p), but few competitors for this class of camera off this. The battery door and tripod mount are located next to each other…so if you need to switch batteries, you’ll also need to remove your quick release mount which is a bit annoying.TG-5 vs TG-6:On paper, the TG-6 hasn’t improved much, but there are subtle but important improvements. New internal filters have been added to reduce chromatic aberration and the purple orb issues. White balance appears slightly improved in the TG-6 and images are much less like to be overexposed (an issues with the TG-5). The LCD on the TG-6 is much approved which is very handy when doing things like exposure compensation. Minimum shutter speed controls, super-macro video, and the ability to use microscope focus in aperture priority are significant changes as well.Purple Orb:All TG cameras (and many non-Olympus cameras) occasionally show a small purple orb in the middle of the image. This is likely light reflecting off of the sensor onto an internal lens element. No reviewer brings it up, but it does exist. Honestly I wouldn’t panic if you see this. I’ve shot 1000’s of TG-6 outdoor images and maybe only 1-2 show this. It is more apt to show indoors and in macro situations. But…it only appears in select contexts. Usually if you have max zoom, have a dark subject at the very center, are using a high iso, and there is a strong off-axis light source (or flat surface nearby like a wall that reflects a lot of light). The new LCD screen makes it easy to see the orb and react accordingly…use the flash (the flash cures this in my experience), zoom out, or recompose the camera so the very center isn’t on something very dark. While many TG-5 users complained of this, I believe this has been significantly reduced in the TG-6, but it will occasionally happen…it’s normal!Accessories:The FD-1 is highly recommended for macro and acts as a lens hood to protect the lens. Screen protectors are recommended too (a two pack for $7 is available if you search ClickElectronics “screen protectors olympus tough”. An external charger and backup batteries are recommend. Li92 are better quality…but Li90 are a significantly better value. Search ClickElectronics “bm Batteries and Charger for Olympus Tough” for a nice charger/battery pack combo.
Norbert –
This is my first TG-series camera. I am coming from a DSLR, which doesn’t play nice with my kayak on a number of levels. I bought this camera as a go-anywhere-do-anything camera, and to my surprise this is exactly what it is. It gives me some of the features of my DSLR, which is nice, but I kept running into the limits of the hardware. Still, most of the time I was able to get what I want.I was able to get some nice bokeh, though I wouldn’t want to use this for portraits. Maybe with the teleconverter it would become a passable portrait camera, I don’t know. I used it for landscapes, lots of landscapes, and it worked pretty well for that. I see some color bleeding and some vignette, but I wouldn’t call those problematic. The lens is the equivalent of a standard zoom, so no bird-watching with this thing, and I doubt the teleconverter can do a whole lot to change that. I had a chance to play with the fisheye adapter for about an hour and it gave me just a slightly wider angle overall, but nothing I would call a must-have. This camera is amazing for macro photography, though: my few attempts at it all turned out stunning.Hardware is pretty sturdy, though the screen at the back scratches easily. GET A PROTECTOR! I am not particularly worried about the lack of an EVF as I wear glasses, though I seem to be alone to not consider this a problem. The screen is somewhat hard to see in bright sunlight, but I am able to manage. The camera survived salt water, sand, being tossed unprotected in my luggage, even being in my PFD while I kayak and perform stunts. I am quite pleased! It’s the right tool for the job and it worked pretty well! The camera is small, the controls are sometimes hard to operate with gloves, but I don’t see how a compact camera can possibly solve that issue: I guess Olympus can add a touchscreen, but touchscreens don’t work well when water is involved.Now for the software. Argh the software!The Olympus RAW format is ORF and is mostly unsupported by anything. There is a plugin for Photoshop (not sure if Lightroom supports it, but I hear no), and that’s about it. I got a once-in-a-lifetime offer to get the Adobe software for regular price, and that’s the extent of the support I got from Olympus. What if I don’t want to use Adobe stuff? There is no indication anywhere in the documentation how exactly I am supposed to integrate Olympus RAW with any photo processing workflow, including Adobe’s which they promote so aggressively. Eventually I stumbled upon something called Olympus Workspace, which appears to do something close to what Lightroom does, but I ultimately settled on a third-party tool called Luminar. Luminar worked pretty well.I wish I had more choices! It’s a shame a camera so well regarded and so respected (the TG-5 is practically the gold standard for camera for water sports) doesn’t do more to be supported by photo-processing software out there.The battery life is on par with my DSLR! I can get several hundred pictures on a single battery charge! I also love the in-camera modes for panorama, HDR and focus-stacking. Neither of them are perfect, of course: the panorama mode is trying to stitch shots by tracking landmarks in your frame, but when it cannot find one right at the edge of the frame (e.g. it encounters the empty horizon), it gets hopelessly lost. Similarly, focus-stacking would sometimes fail for reasons I have not investigated yet.I hope this is helping someone.
Amanda Rushton-Carroll –
I bought the Olympus TG-5 a year ago; and was happy with the overall compromise of image quality from the 12 mega pixel sensor and its size; along with the video quality. The 4x zoom of the lens and the aperture appear unchanged from its predecessor. The TG-6 is an polishing of the edges of the TG-5; the main change being a MUCH better screen. The resolution of the screen has been more than doubled from 460k to 1049k pixels; this makes a big difference in reading things like the menu; and generally makes the interface easier to use.The interface itself is a mess; its easy to use and broken into pages but the camera for some reason splits some settings into the Menu button and some by pressing the OK button – and honestly why it cant have the settings from OK in the menu’s baffles me. NO other camera I have lets you change the image or video format settings by pressing the OK button rather than the Menu button. If its your only camera im sure it makes sense; but I always find myself scrolling through settings to find where im going.I chose the TG-5 for similar reasons I might choose the 6 – I wanted 4k video recording; as well as good stills capability. I could have gone with a gopro and zoomed with my flippers but the TG-6 (to a camera lover) is a more familiar object. A year ago I was happier with the optical image stabilization on the Olympus over the GoPros – but having bought a hero 6 the stabilization there is staggeringly good; even when diving through passes with rapid currents.There other benefits over the gopros like the TG5 it doesn’t have a fisheye lens so video and photos are less distorted, With a 4xzoom, at your fingers settings control you can zoom with your finger rather than flippers and as i have a drawer of them that the TG5 uses SD cards rather than microsd was also a bonus.Taking the camera out of the box the camera looks a bit transformers-esque and stands apart from the retro looks of a lot of cameras at the moment. There are a lot of lines and texture and material changes all over the camera. The TG-6 does look better to my eyes than the TG-6 simply because its more discreet. I received the black one and the Red highlights all over the TG-5 are gone. The grip surfaces are textured though and it grips well in your hand so some of the lines take some getting used to. Though if you are taking it in the water; use a strap. It sinks like a stone. The camera is small (not tiny like a gopro; but small for someone used to using an SLR); it easily fits into one of my pockets no matter what trousers im wearing. I did find with the TG05 that using it in cooler waters wearing gloves the buttons are a tad small – the mode dial in particular is a problem with gloves on. In warmer waters with bare hands its fine.There is a separate dive case for the camera that allows you to dive deeper and has proper controls that you can use with gloves. I took the TG-5 to 10 m without issue; besides it being to dark to really use it. It worked best snorkeling and in shallow reef dives. I havent invested in a case for my TG-5 though I did get one for another camera.In Camera mode the images from the TG6 are in most light conditions noise free, sharp and dont have much distortion. The quality of the 12 megapixel images is really good (I’m guessing not going for 20 or more megapixels helped a lot here.) The photos aren’t compact camera good – they are good; nicely exposed even on auto settings and the overall images are sharp with nice color. The TG-5 was the first rugged compact I have used that can take raw photos the feature is still there on the TG-6; these give you the ultimate control for editing the photo after taking it and aren’t compressed at all (so use more space to store) . You can adjust the ISO and up to 1600 (maybe 3200) the picture looks very good; at 3200 the subject and movement begin to have an impact. The TG-6. If you are taking action shots the camera’s Pro Mode takes 10 shots very quickly which might be handy (with a 4x zoom you wont be that close to the action is all.)One thing much improved in the TG-6 is the Microscope mode. I dont usually take macro photos; but the ability of the camera to get VERY close (the photo of the coin is a 2pound.) and the image stabilization does a good job arresting handshake if you aren’t using a tripod in this mode. The LED light / flash aren’t especially useful in this mode as they are offset from the lens.If editing sounds like hard work the JPGs look good – and the Olympus processing in the camera results in nice sharp images with surprisingly little noise even in shadows. In the menus there are options you can use to tweak the jpg’s to your preference if you go too far you can make the colors really pop. The colors in the JPG’s on neutral settings reveal a camera with a good auto white balance.Underwater if you stay near the surface snorkeling you can get away without a light. There is an LED built in; but it isn’t powerful illumination source. As the surface light fades you are going to need to get very close to the fish to get the shot.The video quality at 4k (25p) is acceptable; though the built in microphones do pick up a LOT of external noise and the sound of the zoom and playing with test video i had to drop the audio considerably. There are also timelapse modes that will output 4k Timelapse video. The timelapse feature is one I have found the TG-5 to have a niche in; as its rugged I’m happier to leave it in the elements over night; and live with some of the noise rather than risk a more expensive camera.The TG-5’s battery was ok; shooting video at 4k takes a dent. In my testing of the TG-6 that hasnt changed. I just drained it in about 45 minutes of shooting 4k video. You can charge it over USB so if you are in and out of the water that is a good way to get it charged back up. (handy if you are on a dive or snorkel boat.) Though a spare battery is definitely the simplest solution.As I intimated at the start the TG-6 is a clear evolution from the TG-5. Last year I was super happy with the quality as it was a significant step up from the Richoh tough camera I had been using. I took the TG5 and 6 out together and image quality wise they essentially identical. The TG-6 is the better camera simply for its screen; everything is crisper on screen.