I regularly keep an eye on Shopgoodwill.com auctions. Looking for the unexpected opportunity. A nice camera for a pitance. It’s not very frequent – I’m surprised by how much people are ready to spend on cameras donated to a charity and sold untested.

Sometimes you are lucky. A good camera gets unnoticed – so poorly described that almost nobody can guess what it really is – or the online auction ends at a time when most people have better things to do, and can not be on line to “snipe”.

There were a few auctions ending on Xmas eve and I ended up being the highest bidder for two cameras – a Canon Photura I’m currently testing, and this black Olympus Tough TG-5. The item was correctly described, was said to have passed some basic tests (both points which are not that frequent at Shopgoodwill) but there was very little competition to acquire it – no bidding war and no absurd high sale price. For a change.

The first thing I did of course was to compare it with the Olympus Tough TG-4 I had bought a few months ago.

What are the differences?

The big difference is the sensor. All Tough TG-x models are built around a 1/2.3in sensor. In the first two models (TG-1 and TG-2), the sensor was a 12 megapixel backlit CMOS. The TG-3 benefited from an upgrade to 16 megapixels, which was carried over to the TG-4. The TG-3 and 4 were criticized for their poor control of noise in the darker areas of an image, and for the TG-5, Olympus reverted to 12 megapixel design. With a pixel pitch of 1.53μm versus 1.33μm for the TG-4 each pixel gets 15% more light. Combined with a more powerful image processing engine (a dual quad core Olympus truepic VIII as opposed to the TG-4’s truepic VII), the TG-5 should offer an improved control over noise and deliver cleaner pictures.

The new 12 megapixel sensor also brings a larger sensitivity range – up to 12,800 ISO to whomever is brave enough to test such a setting on a 1/2.3″ sensor, and the support of 4k video.

The other changes relate to the fit and finish and the ergonomics for the most part – there is now a conventional zoom lever and a new control knob on the top plate, and a switch to activate and deactivate the on-board GPS. And big news, the proprietary Olympus connector (used to charge the camera’s battery) has finally been replaced with a standard USB connector (yes!).

Nothing is perfect, and the menus have been revised. Olympus has gained a bad reputation for its confusing and un-intuitive menus, and proves it’s deserved with the TG-5. On the Tough TG-s, Olympus have given a particular emphasis to what they call “live control”: some important settings are not available through the menus, but only when the photographer is ready to shoot a new picture and presses the “OK” key – a column of options is displayed as an overlay at the right of the image, with the different values that each setting can take displayed on an horizontal bar at the bottom of the picture. It’s the only way to chose the form factor of the images (4:3, 3:2 or 16:9, for instance, or the image quality (RAW, RAW+JPEG Fine, JPEG Low) and so on).

At the same time, additional settings have been added to the conventional menus of the TG-5. Some are obviously useful (like setting the standard and high limits of the Auto ISO sensitivity control, the color space or entering copyright information), but others seem to duplicate (or refine) settings already available in the “live control” mode. And they’re not always available – some options are greyed out when the camera is set to “scene” mode, for instance. To make matters worse, instead of giving meaningful names to the new options, Olympus simply designated them as A, B1, B2, C, and so on. Confusing.

Shooting with the TG-5

Are the new sensor and the new processing engine improving the noise situation? Imaging-Resource had compared a new TG-5 with a TG-4 a few years ago ( https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/olympus-tg-5/olympus-tg-5-image-quality.htm) and had mixed feelings about it.

Yes, the TG-5 delivered an improvement, but not as large as the testers had expected. The improvement was particularly obvious in the 100 to 800 ISO range, where the noise reduction algorithm was at the same time much less aggressive and more efficient – resulting in more details and less chroma noise.

In my experience, the TG-4 was producing images with very visible noise in the shadows, even by sunny weather under the tropics, and it was not easy to get rid of it. Any improvement in that area would be welcome, and would justify an upgrade to the TG-5, if it delivered the goods.

I compared the two cameras in the real life and tried to validate the conclusions of Imaging-Resource. Firstly, on both cameras, there is more noise on the Raw files than on the jpegs. Which means that the processing engine does a good job at removing it when it generates jpegs. Secondly, the TG-5’s jpegs show more detail in the shadows than the TG-4. The difference is not huge, but big enough to be visible on the Retina screen of an iPad. So, yes, the TG-5’s pictures look better. And what about the rest of the user experience?

The TG-5’s body is made of a different type of plastic and feels more substantial in the hands. Because it offers more controls (physical like the wheel on the top plate or logical with more options in the menus), the TG-5 does not seem as simple to use as the TG-4, and will require more peeks in the user manual than the TG-4, before the photographer is totally familiar with it.

As a conclusion, I would say that the TG-5 has a higher potential than the TG-4 (more details in the shadows, greater ability to be configured to the preferences of the photographer) – but that it’s also a tad more complicated to use. Although it’s difficult to quantify, the TG-5 seems to deliver better images in more circumstances than the TGs of previous generations could. Not having to carry and use a proprietary connection cable to charge the battery of the camera (and using any standard USB cable instead) could very well be the most significant (and the most welcome) improvement.

In the grand scheme of things

As of today (early 2025), there are very few new compact cameras on the shelves of the resellers, and even fewer which are shockproof, waterproof and adventure ready. The OM System TG-7 is the most competent of those always ready cameras – but like all the previous versions of the Tough TG, it will be limited by its 1/2.3″ sensor.

Premium compact cameras, like the Sony RX100 or the Canon G7X, have a much larger sensor. The same can be said of the iPhone (the sensor behind the 16 Pro Max’s main camera is almost as large as the RX100’s at 1/1.14in). Without even considering the “computational photography” trickery of the iPhone, all are obviously going to yield much better results than the TGs in low light and in the shadows. But the Sony and the Canon are not weather resistant, and their long telescopic zoom makes them more delicate than a Tough TG (you won’t bring them to the beach or on a dusty trail ride), while the iPhone (and similar high end smart phones) are fully automated wizards that can’t compete with a dedicated camera when it comes to ergonomics and flexibility of the settings.

The TG-7 is a very limited upgrade of the TG-6, itself a rather limited upgrade of the TG-5. The improvement in image quality and ergonomics between the three most recent TGs and the previous generations is not huge, but any improvement in the 100 to 800 ISO range is good to take, and if you can find a TG-5 at a reasonable price, my recommendation would be to take it over a TG-4. If only for its universal USB connector.

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