Sometimes you just don't want to agonise over whether you should choose the soup or the salad; the Coke or the Pepsi; the PC or the Mac. Olympus realises just how hard some choices can be, which is why it's made the FE series of digital cameras. They're simple and direct, and they require almost no choices besides when to press the shutter. The Olympus FE-240 is one such camera.
Design
The attractive, compact FE-240 measures 23.4mm thick and weighs just 115 grams. Its small metal body fits comfortably in most pockets. Despite its small size, the camera's various controls are easy to manipulate, with buttons large enough for big thumbs to use.
Features
The FE-240's most notable feature is its lens. The camera's 38mm-to-190mm-equivalent lens offers a 5x magnification factor over the other FE-cameras' 3x lenses. Besides the increased zoom, the FE-240 sports fairly mundane features, such as a 7-megapixel sensor and a 2.5-inch LCD screen.
Like all Olympus FE-series cameras, the FE-240 is almost completely devoid of manual settings. Besides flash and macro shooting, preset scene modes, and exposure compensation, users can't make any image adjustments. White balance, ISO sensitivity, and other factors are completely automated by the camera, giving a very literal sense to the phrase "point-and-shoot." This isn't necessarily a bad thing; automation can be beneficial as long as the images look good in the end.
Performance
The FE-240's performance ranged from mediocre to terrible. After a 2.6-second startup time, we could only fire off a shot every 5.1 seconds; that painful wait increased to 5.7 seconds with the onboard flash enabled. While 5 seconds is indeed far too long to wait between shots, it's not too surprising; the previous-generation FE-200 had shot-to-shot times of more than 7 seconds. The shutter wasn't nearly as responsive as it should have been, lagging 0.8 second on our high-contrast target and 1.9 seconds in low-contrast conditions. Like almost all Olympus FE-series cameras, the FE-240 doesn't have any burst mode.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
Image quality
Though its performance was disappointing, the FE-240's images were actually quite nice. Colours were accurate and neutral -- even indoors, a tricky thing to accomplish with a camera's automatic white balance. Fine details came through clearly, and we saw very little lens distortion. Because of its fully automated operation, we couldn't perform our full regimen of noise tests, but given adequate lighting, photos had very little grain or fuzz. Just be careful when shooting in low light; the camera automatically ramps up the ISO sensitivity, generating lots of noise.
Despite the Olympus FE-240's sluggish performance and almost complete lack of manual settings, it's still a pretty good camera for new users. If you simply want to take decent photos and don't want to fiddle around with a lot of menus and buttons, it's a acceptable choice. Its price may seem a bit high for such a simple camera, but its photos look good, it's easy to use, and it's small enough to take almost anywhere.
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chris
12/11/2008, 10:11 PM
rating
1/10
I have been most dissappointed.
Pros: small
Cons: FAR TOO SLOW. photos grainy, or blurry,,,
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chris
17/06/2008, 10:10 AM
rating
3/10
I was mislead when purchasing this camera, after specifying that I the fully manual mode that my previous Canon had was one thing I wanted, I was still pointed to this camera. I was tempted to take it back, but thought I'd give it a go anyway.
However, while it's nice and slim and has a great screen, and takes decent photos in some situations, in others it sucks.
One big selling point was the 5x optical zoom in a slim camera, all other similarly slim cameras were only 3x zoom. However, what I found when looking through the last set of photos I took was that at maximum optical zoom setting, the photo quality is terrible.
So while the photo is beautiful and clear when zoomed right out, it's definitely distorted when zoomed in on the 5x optical zoom. Hence the big selling point is no longer a good selling point.
I definitely want to go back to Canon, they take much better photos. I'll probably go for a bigger more featured camera and just get a mobile phone with a nice camera for taking simple point and shoot photos with a pocket sized camera.
Pros: Small and light
Great screen
Good looking camera
Cons: No manual settings
Zooming in results in distorted images
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kay-en
17/03/2008, 09:19 PM
rating
5/10
Its an ok.
Pros: takes good photos
Cons: far too slow
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claz
19/12/2007, 04:45 PM
rating
10/10
Great I loved it
Pros: Small and good pictures
Cons: To slow
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ceebee
24/06/2007, 09:42 PM
rating
2/10
Far inferior to my old bulkier Kodak. A very disappointing camera... useless for my humble purposes of taking pics of family, children, pets, holidays; & also photographing items for selling on eBay, where I need ACCURATE colour reproduction & clarity.
Pros: Small and compact.
Cons: Extremely slow shutter speed means taking photos of children, animals, anything moving, is near impossible - unless you like a pic of an ear or the back of a head or just a blur!
The colour reproduction is abysmal - I CANNOT get true colour no matter what the lighting conditions; and the colour lacks vibrancy and depth.
Hard to get a sharp picture - probably because of the long time lag between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken.
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safeer
13/06/2007, 03:41 PM
rating
5/10
1.it's sensitive to small shake
2.video software is not coming along with camera
3. compell to format memory after copying to computer
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