I've been using a 3.0 mpxl Olympus Stylus for the last 2 years.. LOVE it!! Weather-proof.. bullet-proof..Idiot-proof. The only problem is my wife and I are constantly fighting over it so last week we agreed we'd buy another. Did my usual anal research and decided we'd try the Olympus Stylus 740.. Bought mine at a local Circuit City at a very reasonable $199.99. Looks good... Feels good in the hand.. feels substantial..

I spent the weekend reading the manual.. learning the functions.. taking some indoor pics due to the heavy rain here and al turned out very good. I was feeling good about my purchase until Monday morning when the sun came out and I decided to go outside for some outdoor shots.. I immediately found the camera's Achilles heel The smoke-tinted view finder may look all cool and sexy when indoors and viewing your own pics but when you go outside it's becomes almost opaque. In bright light I couldn't even see enough image to frame a picture. In the bright sunlight the rear viewer does better as a mirror than a viewfinder. I could shave with this camera..

I checked and there's was no way to make the viewfinder bright enough to live with. I checked it side-by side with my 2 year old Olympus Stylus and the old one's viewfinder was literally 100% brighter... Unbelievable that they'd put this camera on the market. Thinking it might just be me.. I gave the little camera to my unsuspecting wife (who takes wonderful macro shots) and asked her to try it out.. she came back 5 minutes later and said she couldn't use it either.. Bottom line... Deal breaker. We took it back the same day.

On a hunch, we went back to Circuit City and swapped it for the weather-proof version right up from the 740 and it had the same problem..Back to the store and swapped THAT one for the FE-240 non-weather-proof version. This was the 3rd camera in 5 days!! While it had a visible viewfinder, the camera just felt fragile so we sheepish-ly took THAT one back, too. I'll bet the sales guy hated us by the end of the week.

I love Olympus and have been using their products for years with gleeful abandon but IMHO they really dropped the ball on the latest weather-proof versions.

We ended up buying a Canon SD 850 which is a keeper, but I miss the weather-proofness.