Olympus Stylus FE-230 7.1MP Digital Camera Review

Olympus used to make good-quality digital cameras, but their product lines in the last couple of years have been emphasizing the wrong set of features.The company tries to out-do the others by making tiny digital cameras -- the FE-230 is probably the smallest real digital camera I've seen -- you have to see it in person to believe it.It packs over 7 megapixels, a 3x optical zoom that also works in movie mode, and a number of useful shooting modes.It's also very easy to use.

Unfortunately, the picture quality, which Olympus should have invested money in improving, is very lacking.Still images all have this blurry or fuzzy look to it, even when shot on a tripod.There's something not quite right with the lens.I guess it's both because the camera's super-super-compact body demands a tiny lens, and optical physics tells us that a tiny lens often screws up the image quality (by bending and deflecting light too much), and because Olympus uses some cheap lens (the camera is made in Vietnam).Compare this to Fuji's and Sony's just-slightly-bigger models and you'll see the latter companies use much better lenses which are probably no bigger than the one on the FE-230.

The upshot is, the FE-230 takes incredibly dull and fuzzy pictures, as if the camera cannot focus properly.If you are in sales (e.g., a real estate agent) this is a good pocketable camera to carry for business.But if you want to take pictures for your own photo albums, skip this.Get super-slim cameras from Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, or Casio instead.

(Also, this camera uses the xD-card flash memory, which in my previous experience with lots of Fuji cameras is not very reliable and is definitely quite slow, esp. at capacity of 1GB or more.)



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