Olympus FE-300 Review

Review Date: November 26th 2007
Author: Gavin Stoker

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Conclusion

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	3
Ease-of-Use	4
Image Quality	3
Value for Money	3

Around £200 (less, with Internet deals) for a good looking, stylishly designed 12 megapixel zoom compact from a well-known brand looks like a great deal on paper – almost too good to be true. And so it proves in practice. Though the Olympus FE-300 is commendably easy to use – with that now familiar 'guide' function on the mode wheel offering novice users reference to what is, in effect, an in-camera manual that automatically makes function selections for you – and it's reasonably swift in operation, if not a class leader, the resultant images are what lets it down. The real bugbear here is camera shake, an inherent problem with slender camera designs that the Olympus FE-300 fails to effectively address. Bumping up the ISO simply results in detail loss and images that are unusable anyway. If you want a camera for any more than pointing and shooting – and the FE-300 doesn't offer much more functionality than just that – you'll be disappointed. That's unless you really are a first time digital camera user with nothing to compare its performance to. You get what you pay for and if having a good looking compact to win the envy of your mates is more important than the resulting images, then the FE-300 is for you. But for most of us picture quality is all that matters, which means that we can only award the distinctly average Olympus FE-300 a distinctly average score.

PhotographyBLOG is a member of the DIWA organisation. Our test results for the Olympus FE-300 have been submitted to DIWA for comparison with test results for different samples of the same camera model supplied by other DIWA member sites.

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