The color is muted and color detail is mushy at best, even at the lowest ISO. Colors on the Macbeth chart not only appear faded next to the sharply oversaturated Verve, it looks like each color was put into a blender and poured back into each square as a pulpy mess.
Admittedly, the Verve’s sharpness isn’t much better, but the vibrant color ads a snap back to the picture. The Canon’s colors are more tame, and image sharpness in color areas is considerably better. This is a case where Olympus Stylus 720 SW is an excellent hardware design with somewhat mediocre image quality. But our printer tests show clearly that what I see onscreen doesn’t really make a huge difference in printed output.
Honestly, if you’re like most shooters, you’ll be happy to have this rugged beauty along for all your activities, getting images where you’d normally not risk having a camera of any kind. And a good majority of shooters are hardly using all those megapixels when they output their stack of 4×6 images (you only need 2 megapixels for a decent 4×6, people), so maybe Olympus is right with their strategy of building the camera not only for the rigors of the real world, but for how the resulting images will be used in the real world.