High quality good camera with proprietary nuisances

We got an Olympus Stylus for my son's birthday last year and he really liked it a lot.  I liked it too from the times I got to use it.  To alleviate my electronic-gadget-envy, my wife got me an Olympus Stylus for my birthday this year. 

I have a love-hate relationship with this camera.

I love the photo quality and the ease of use.  I love all the special features like panorama shots.  It has a feature called "scenes" where you can scroll through a menu and choose the option for what you are trying to capture, such as a night scenery shot, food, underwater, or sports, and it will automatically choose the various settings you need to capture a great photo.  I use the night scenery shot (no flash, distant focus, long exposure) to take pictures of things like my house with all the Christmas lights on it.  I use the "cuisine" setting to take pictures of food for my blog and restaurant reviews. 

Another huge selling point for us was the fact the camera is waterproof and shock-hardened.  At the time we got it, we were living in Hawaii and it was great for snorkeling and taking pictures of fish and each other under water. 

Now for the "hate" part.

I hate companies that develop SPECIAL, UNIQUE, PROPRIETARY components so you HAVE to use THEIR special stuff with the camera.  The two biggest problems I have with this camera are the battery and the USB cable. 

My previous camera was a Canon Powershot A520 that I loved.  It ran on 2 AA batteries and would last for WEEKS without needing replacement batteries.  Even when the batteries did die, it was EASY to grab another pair of AA batteries out of my backpack to replace them while I was on a long hike, miles from civilization.

Not so with the Olympus.

The Olympus uses a very special, unique battery that only works with the Olympus camera and has to use their unique charging device to recharge the battery. 

To add insult to injury, the battery doesn't last very long.  After a couple of days of use, the battery is dead and in need of recharging, and it doesn't give you much warning.  Just all of a sudden, on the trail miles from the parking lot, the low-battery icon will come on and then you're out-of-luck (unless you pay Olympus more money to buy another spare special proprietary battery). 

To add further insult to injury, it's not even the same battery from one Olymps camera model to the next.  My wife figured we'd be all set with my son's Olympus, and we got him the spare battery for his camera.  We figured when we go on trips and stuff that we could just take ONE Olympus battery charger and freely cycle through the three batteries in our two cameras.   Nnnnnope!  Although they LOOK remarkably similar, they are just ever-so-slightly DIFFERENT.  So I CAN'T use my son's Olympus battery charger and I CAN'T use my son's Olympus spare battery.  Instead, we have to carry TWO Olympus battery chargers with us on trips and so far I only have my ONE battery that will work in MY camera.  This is extremely frustrating.  (Why couldn't they just have gone with the AA's???).

Now for the USB cable.  Instead of using the standard style of USB cable that I use for my GPS receiver, my MP3 player, my wife's expensive SLR camera, my programmable TV remote control, my BlueTooth headset, my BlackBerry...  see a pattern here?  Nope, Olympus had to come up with their own UNIQUE cable to hook up the camera to the computer.  So I have ONE USB cable in my travel bag that will work with EVERY SINGLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE I OWN, EXEPT for the Olympus camera has to have it's own special cable. 

To once again add insult to injury, when you plug the camera into the computer with this specialized USB cable, it does NOT supply POWER to the camera.  Nope.  So as you sit there browsing the pictures on the camera and copying them to your computer or uploading them to shutterfly for the grandparents to see how your family vacation is going, it is SUCKING DOWN your already limited-capacity and unique battery.

Unfortunately for me, I learned this the hard way while we were on vacation.  I set up the camera in our hotel room with uploading all the pictures from the day to shutterfly and went to bed.  The next morning, I went to take the camera and start our next day's adventures, and discovered the battery was D. E. A. D. as a doornail (because I had left it "on" all night uploading the pictures on the computer while I was asleep). 

One would THINK that the designers of the camera would have (a) used the standard USB cable every other device on the planet uses, and/or (b) allowed the camera to use power from the USB plug instead of draining the battery (like every other device on the planet), and/or (c) incorporate some feature that even if it's plugged into the USB port that it would shut off after a certain time period of no activity in order to preserve the battery.

I think it's all just a ploy by Olympus to get pay they more money to buy a spare battery. 

In summary, I love the pictures I get from this camera.  I hate the logistical planning required to make sure I have enough battery power to TAKE the pictures.