Olympus TG-5

fantastic! you are making me want to ditch film 🙂 I am hooked on your reviews. I love the movement to "lower tech" days.

I went to the same thoughts about the tech sweet spot, including that I liked some imperfections in digital. And also recently sold my nikon Z6 kit to go full Olympus for identical reasons, my em5iii and some small lenses easily fit a daiper bag :). I can recommend the 45mm f1.8 lens. That thing is magical regardless the price (but it does help that this lens goes for €120 second hand).

I'm with you on some points. I'm finding that the "imperfections" that full frame pixel peepers see can actually be pleasing. Plus programs can fix all the noise if the noise is bothersome. DXO photolab is a great program for that.

Low tech, low spec cameras are my favourite, and these type of videos are fun to watch.
I also love your laid back style videos … Keep up the good work, you've just got a new subscriber.

great video! im enjoying this laid-back athmosphere. maybe more photos would be nice!

I have this one, bought mine for a trip too! I wanted a waterproof point&shoot and at the time this was the only one (outside of more specialized gear) that could shoot RAW. Always been pleased by the images I get out of it, at least at the wide end. I hand it off to my friend's kiddo sometimes too, it's fun to see what images she gets from it. 🙂

I have a Nikon Coolpix W300, which is fairly similar to the TG5. It's waterproof to 30m, not that I'd ever want to go that deep!!!. The main reason I bought it is my part of the world gets really heavy rain and despite the water resistance of some of my cameras, I wouldn't necessarily take them out in the rain when it gets as heavy as it does. The W300 eats it for breakfast. For film, I got myself a Minolta Weathermatic Dual 35. It's pretty much as rainproof as the W300, but it's only good for 5-6m, which is fine by me!!. Funny thing, both cameras are yellow in colour, so they sort of match 🙂

In 2003 I bought Pentax wp waterproof camera. Was my first digital camera and it was cool.

What camera and lens do you use for your talking head bits?

Very nice video, thanks

The lens flare yields a ugly purple dot due to the folding len design. It also has no aperature blades but controls light by built in ND filters. Still a GREAT camera:)

New subscriber. Love your love of all older photography items. I think the TG5 is an awesome camera ; it's a cliché but true saying – the best camera is the one in your hand. Possibly the best photo I ever captured was with the TG 5, in JPEG. Before I appreciated RAW. Take care. (Cool delivery BTW). P. S. it would be brilliant if you could include some images to the video although I appreciate that it might mean changing/interupting your work flow.

I am a retired pro and I have a LOT of gear that goes back to the 1980's. I got the TG-5 for one specific purpose: to take hiking. I live in New Zealand and we have a lot of places where the weather can change extremely quickly. I usually take a conventional camera or two for the larger sensor and loner lens reach, but the TG-5 is there for when things turn to custard. This happened when I was hiking on NZ's Tongariro National Park: an alpine area that is dominated by three active, but normally dormant volcanoes. One can do a multi-day hike (we call it tramping in NZ) around the volcanic complex, but these peaks generate their own climates. I have been there in high summer when the weather has changed from unlimited visibility and 35DegC, to almost zero visibility and 10DegC in less than an hour. On the occasion I took the TG-5 it was then end of the the normal tramping season, in May. I got part way round and all trampers were advised to abort because winds on the tops were gusting over 130km/hr and there are steep drop-offs. I had to make my way back but ended up in the teeth of the storm over a four-hour slog. The normal cameras were put away but the TG-5 allowed my to take photos of the rather challenging conditions. It may not be the most advanced camera, but as they say: the best camera is the one you have with you (and can safely use)!

I absolutely love my TG camera! I have the TG-6 and at first I found it kind of fiddly to use. It took me two years of using it every day to really figure out what it could do and get used to it. The glass in front of the lens is actually glass. It's nano coated so you can see it does tend to bead water that hits it similar to the B+W nano filters or the Nikon lenses with the fluorine coating. I found that makes it really easy to clean. The lens only seems to show the aberrations when it's at its widest. Once you change the focal length to something longer it goes away. The lens has some really high resolution close up. I usually get the lens to 10.3 mm (zoom until the aperture reads f3.5) for many of my photos, and at that focal length it's pretty flat and sharp through the whole frame. One thing I don't think many people realize is that that TG-5 and TG-6 have lenses that go slightly past 1:1 magnification like most regular macro lenses do. You have to be at 18mm (zoom all the way in) to get to this. You can get a rice grain to more than fill the sensor. At 18mm you get a very flat field like a regular macro lens, and I love this because it's one of my most portable macro rigs. I love taking photos of tiny tiny flowers, and you can even see the pollen grains quite clearly. On a full frame sensor to fill the frame with a rice grain I need to reverse my lens and put it on my bellows rig. It's a big and cumbersome setup to carry around. I can get photos just as good with my TG-6 with a lot less fuss and trouble. Funny enough, my photos from my TG-6 are the ones people want to buy prints of. A few people insist that I must have shot it on my Nikon with a much larger sensor, but little do they know.

Another tip is that the lens only has two true apertures and the last aperture is through an ND filter. You can control blooming, depth of field and some aberrations wide open in very challenging situations by stopping the lens down one stop. This is done with an internal Waterhouse stop that closes the lens down one stop, and if you listen closely there's a faint click from inside the camera as the lens slots it into place. I do tend to shoot my TG-6 wide open most of the time though

Recently the image stabilization on my iPhone quit, and now everything jiggles uncontrollably, so I've been taking my TG-6 everywhere with me. I take photos of all the things I usually take photos of and if I want to share them I use OI.Share. Another useful thing with OI.Share is a wireless remote trigger. I use that with my TG-6 on my tripod for some of my most demanding macro photos at high magnification. The battery indeed doesn't last super long so I have three of them and the UC-92 battery charger. This way I can keep shooting with it without any trouble. Another cool thing is that even when the body is off, you can tap the "Info" button and get a reading of all the field sensors on the TG-5 and 6 and get the time, your compass direction, the temperature of the camera body (they tell you the temperature is only accurate if you are underwater, but if you leave the body on the table for a while you can measure the actual temperature), air pressure and altitude, and your GPS coordinates. The other thing I enjoy about my TG-6 is that you have assisted GPS and it lets it get a lock faster. You just have to make sure it's up to date. I mostly use the GPS to set the clock on the camera body and not much else, but I thought that was nice. It's a really neat camera, and I absolutely love mine. It's great to be able to wash it off in the sink if you get anything on it.

My first camera was an Olympus film camera. My grandparents were like "what can we give her that we wouldn't worry about if it got lost or broken" and that's how I got my first camera. The TG-6 was my first Olympus digital body and it is truly a great first camera in my opinion. My Olympus 35RC is not particularly rugged, but it was not worth much at that time, and that's why my grandparents let me have it as a little kid (now that all the film stuff is worth more, idk if anyone would necessarily let their granddaughter run around with a camera like that), but the Tough cameras are not just fun to use, but they're durable enough not to get broken by a first time shooter, and with some use and getting used to it you can really do a lot of advanced things with it. After two and a half years I'm in love with my TG-6, and I remember the controls like the back of my hand. I use manual focus with the magnify focus aid, and it's been working really well for me

Just to let you know if someone is using a browser like Brave, or any browser with ad blockers, the tile links you include in the video won't show up. I love your videos, and I'd like to follow the links you included to other videos about this camera, but unfortunately can't. If you could include them in the description as well that would be great. Cheers!

If your into Olympus try the omd em1 mark I. 16 mega pixels, small, great grip and fantastic images for M43

I commented on your previous video that I was hoping for you to add more sample photos…. and here we are! Wow! Okay, your channel is 10/10