You have this friend. He did you a favour one time, and now he’s just there, hanging out all the time, looking ugly on your Facebook. This $US150 dollar point-and-shoot has the tools to fix his fugly mug.
On the surface, the Olympus VR-340 might appear to be just a camera with OK specs packed into a tiny package for a bargain basement price: A 10x lens on a dinky-sized 16MP sensor is nothing special and nothing to shake your fist at either. It’s just, you know, a budget point-and-shoot camera that’s coming out in March.
But then you dive into the camera’s features and you realise that this is way more than just a diminutive point-and-shoot camera thanks to Olympus’ new “Beauty Make-Up Mode”. Take a portrait of your less-than-handsome chum in this mode, and you’ll be given a battery of pre-programmed tweaks in an interface that looks like a digitised make-up and plastic surgery kit. You can whiten your friend’s teeth, beef up his nonexistent eyelashes, shrink his double chin and even get rid of the horrid, omnipresent dark circles under his eyes. In total you can add up to 18 “enhancements” to you friend’s features.
The lesson is clear. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t judge a point-and-shoot until you familiarise yourself with its features. [Olympus]