Review of the Olympus FE20

About three months ago, my boyfriend asked to borrow my camera for a school trip. No problem there, I wasn't using it that week, and he had a good reason for wanting to take it... except while he was on the trip his bag was stolen with my camera inside it. Not a promising start to a story, you might think, and it really wasn't. The only good thing to come out of the event was the chance to buy a new camera.

At the time, I was working in an electronics store, and spent a lot of time looking after new cameras and demonstrating them to customers so I had a decent idea of what I wanted. I'd also owned Olympus in the past and generally liked their menu set-up. A hint for buying a new camera: try to spend at least five minutes playing around with the menus. If you can't find everything you might need in that time, that's a problem, because you aren't realistically going to carry the instructions around with you, when you're taking photos.

The FE20 was on special that week, which was also a selling point, to be honest. Also, it took micro-SD cards (by using an included adapter) as well as the fairly expensive and unpopular xD format. The specs are pretty standard: 8 mega pixels, a 3x optical zoom. The face detection is pretty nifty, I'll agree, and so is the anti-shake. There's a decent sized LCD screen, which is reasonably easy to see even in sunlight.

As for how it handles, it works well for shots of people, but isn't so good (in my experience) at trying to get decent shots of objects for things like ebay or reference purposes. I had a lot of trouble getting it to focus, and it didn't seem to make a difference if I was in regular or macro mode. That said, it is generally a pretty good camera for the low-end price, and the fact that it is so small and easy to chuck in my pocket or bag makes up for any shortfalls. I found the reproduction of color to be reasonable, and the shutter lag was a lot better than other models in the same price bracket.

I still need to have a proper test with the video, but the fact it can record sound is incredibly promising (those hilarious videos of your friends doing that hilarious thing they do tend to be less funny when played out in stony silence.)

Overall, it's a good camera if you want to something to record some quick shots, carry around with you, and aren't looking for anything too flexible. It's a point and shoot and it knows it, and there's nothing wrong with that, as long as that's what you're expecting too.