Olympus FE-230

Reviews

Posted on 07 / 08 / 2007

Compact, good screen size, picture quality, zoom, stylish no nonsense lines-looks really nice.
Poor quality lens, slow performance, ability in low light is a serious limitation.

I specified a fairly tight budget to a friend whose knowledgeable about all things photography, he gave me a number of options.

His general advice was as follows...

Anything from 6-10 megapixels will meet my needs. Any extra pixels above this amount are just selling / marketing jango advantages, rather than of genuine use. He advised, to visit a some shops and handle a few - digital cameras around £100-150 do not vary considerably in size, weight, or ergonomics, The screens will typically be 2.5 inch, but the quality of the viewfinders can vary in brightness. Most will be small and light cameras with simple controls. Some brands like Pentax tend to offer more bangs for the buck apparently - however, the lower the price tag the harder it becomes to improve upon body or lens quality.

Why I chose an FE model was the build quality and design, it really caught my eye. I had also read Olympus had made a big improvement on earlier FE models. In-store, handling was easy, the all-automatic operation meant my wife and kids could borrow it and use it, overall ideal for a techno phobe. The image quality in typical whether conditions was good. My friend was intrigued, so we swapped cameras for the weekend. He agreed with my conclusions, but highlighted that the lens quality was disappointing, AF system, shutter speed and overall performance slow and the acid test of any camera, it's low light ability fared below his expectations. The automatic white balance, barrel distortion, wide angle blurring were additional problems he came across. For price, specifications, performance there are better choices was his sign-off.

I felt a bit silly after my friend handed it back, to people in the know the FE-230 has it's limitations apparently, but for a novice like myself it fit my need, slipped in a small pocket, overall quality was good and the price will not break the bank.

ps. Also, shop around for your memory cards, ebay saved me £30 for a Sandisk card compared to PC World.

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User - SamYan