The Olympus 1030SW is the toughest digital camera ever produced. You can drop it, dunk it, freeze it and other treat it badly and the 1030SW can just keep going. This tough exterior is the reason to buy it. On the inside, the Olympus Stylus 1030SW is more-or-less an average ultra-compact camera. Two distinguishing features are a wide-angle lens, equivalent to 28mm in 35mm terms, and a led-illuminator. The led illuminator serves to light subjects for super-macro photography. Last year, a wide-angle lens in an ultra-compact was a rare thing, but a slew of recent cameras have changed this.

The better side of camera includes good speed, good macro focusing and excellent LCD visibility. The sub-par side includes less reliable exposure, short battery-life, poor ergonomics and a very limited feature set.

Regardless of the pros and cons, this camera beats all others in the tough category. Without the tough part, there are a large number of excellent ultra-compacts, with or without the wide-angle lens, which perform better than the Stylus 1030SW in terms of photography. Two such model are the Fuji Finepix F50fd and the wide-angle Canon Powershot SD870 IS.