Olympus FE-230 Digital Camera Review
By Melissa Robotti
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
September 05, 2007
Introduced in January, the 7.1-megapixel FE-230 is in the lower half of Olympus’s “Fun and Easy” line. It is loaded with typical point-and-shoot features including a 3x optical zoom lens and 2.5-inch LCD screen. Exclusively for fledgling digital photographers, the slim-bodied Olympus FE-230 has 19 Scene modes and a built-in Help guide. It had an introductory price of $199 but can be found online for about $50 less.
At first glance, the FE-230 is an average point-and-shoot. A look at its insides, however, is more revealing. There are no white balance presets, no manual ISO settings, and the lens distorts the images. It gets worse. The FE-230’s images are speckled with noise and the camera takes forever to start up.
The Olympus FE-230 lacks white balance presets, which will throw off the colors in most lighting. Without presets, the camera’s auto white balance setting is left to determine what is white in a scene. Luckily, the FE-230’s Auto setting is accurate except under tungsten light, where the image has an orange hue. Most other manufacturers' entry-level models include some presets.
Some of the FE-230’s competitors, such as the Sony Cyber-shot W55 and Canon PowerShot A560, allow users to manually set the ISO. Like white balance, the FE-230’s ISO is left for the camera to decide. Auto ISO is fine for sunny weather, but in dimmer light the camera may choose a longer shutter speed than necessary. Unless there’s a tripod involved, slow shutter speeds almost always result in blurry photos.
Exposure compensation is the FE-230’s sole manual control, leaving it far behind the competition. Other budget cameras have manual ISO control, white balance presets, and metering options.
The FE-230’s optics are problematic. While the camera produces relatively sharp images, there is significant lens vignetting and barrel distortion. This means images will have dark corners and a bloated center.
While the bad far outweighs the good, the Olympus FE-230 has some positive qualities, but even so, these qualities only amount to average. It has a healthy 19 shooting modes, which is more than what is included on the Sony Cyber-shot W55 and Canon PowerShot A560, but about the same as the Fujifilm FinePix A900 and Panasonic Lumix FX10. The FE-230 also has an extensive built-in help guide that is handy, but other manufacturers offer similar aids.
The FE-230’s 7.2-megapixel resolution outdoes the 6-megapixel Panasonic FX10, but the similarly-priced Fuji A900 has 9 megapixels. The FE-230’s 2.5-inch, 115,000-pixel LCD is common, as is its 3x optical zoom lens, which is bested by the Canon A560 and Fuji A900’s 4x lenses. The FE-230 features digital image stabilization, but the Panasonic FX10 offers far superior optical image stabilization. Among its competition, the FE-230 is the thinnest (Olympus put it in an empty deck-of-cards box to illustrate this point), but what difference does it make if it’s portable but doesn’t take good pictures.
The FE-230 is a bottom feeder in Olympus’s budget digital camera line. Its horrible performance squashes all hope for the FE-210 and 200 models below it. The Olympus FE-230 is easy to use, but takes lackluster pictures. The lack of white balance presets, manual controls, and average components and features make taking frame-worthy photos a game of chance. There are plenty of other digital cameras in this price range that perform far better.
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