The battery life on this camera is quite substantial. I usually like digital cameras that take AA (double-A) batteries simply because I have a whole lot of rechargeable batteries in that size, and a 15-minute charger. This camera, though, takes its own proprietary battery that’s about the size of a Compact Flash memory card. Somehow, this small, small battery lasts for a ridiculously long time. I have taken more than 100 photos on the highest quality settings on one charge. That’s a lot. I don’t even want to know how many it can take on the lowest setting. So, if you’re one of those people like me who generally hates proprietary batteries, fear not, as this one works really well.

There are only two buttons on the top of the camera: one two-stage shutter or “take picture” button, and the power button. The “take picture” and power buttons are designed in such a way so it they can’t get pressed while in your pocket. They’re both slightly recessed into the body of the camera, just perfectly, so they don’t get pressed accidentally, but aren’t hard to press when you want to. The two-stage “take picture” button can be held down half-way to focus, then pressed all the way to take the photo, or just pressed all the way down to do both. This is useful if you are waiting for something to happen and you want to take a picture of it quickly. You can hold your finger down on the button half-way while pointing the camera at what you want to focus on, then when you want to take a picture, you can push the rest of the way down and it’ll take the picture instantly. If you just press the button, it’ll take a little while longer because it has to focus first, but it’s still pretty quick compared to other digital cameras.

On the back of the camera, there are 11 buttons that are all very easy to use. All of the menus and functions of this camera are set up in such a way so that their use is very intuitive. I’ve had no problem navigating through all of the options, and I must say, Olympus did a very good job with user interface. Sure, they may have gone a little overkill with all of the shooting options that they supplied us with, but it’s better to have too many than not enough any day. There is also a small, waterproof speaker on the back for replaying any video clips that you record on the camera. The speaker quality is pretty good, as is the movie-capturing ability. The zoom in and zoom out (W for Wide-Angle and T for Telescopic) functions work quite nicely, and the digital zoom works almost as well as the optical zoom. I’m glad they didn’t try to kill us with buttons and wheels to turn, but instead left us with just the right amount of stuff to click.

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