Olympus FE 120 Digital Camera Review

Review:

The FE-120 is an entry-level digital camera, featuring a common 3x optical zoom lens and a 6-megapixel sensor packed into a slim and light body. Beginners won’t have to consult the user’s manual as the camera comes with an integrated, well designed Help Guide.

Just as the rest of FE Series, the FE-120 has a very easy-to-use design with different buttons for the most important functions such as shooting, playback or deleting images. Other functions like the Flash and Macro modes or the self-timer are conveniently located on an arrow pad.

Just as more advanced cameras, the FE-120 allows users to change the 19 different shooting modes (Portrait, Landscape, Night Scene, Sports, Landscape + Portrait, Night Scene + Portrait, Sunset, Cuisine, Candle, Behind Glass, Available light portrait, Self portrait, Indoor, Beach, Snow, Fireworks) via a dial control on the back of the camera. Decorative frames and borders can be added to any photo in order to be e-mailed for example.

The camera features an easy-to-use and straight forward menu as well as nicely positioned controls. The flash on the other hand can easily blocked by the photographer’s right hand fingers. The 1.8-inch LCD works very well in low light conditions as it ‘gains up’, but can be rather hard to read in bright sunlight as its surface reflects light. It also allows users to adjust the LCD brightness whenever the conditions call for that.

The FE-120 shows visible performance improvements from past models and it needs only about 4.5 seconds from the moment it is powered on and until the first image has been captured. The shutter lag including auto-focusing is only one second and decreases to 0.2 seconds when the scene had already been pre-focused. Shot to shot delay is of about 2 seconds and can increase to about 3 seconds if the flash is needed. In burst mode the camera can capture 5 pictures in less than 3 seconds, a rather respectable performance.

The camera features great connectivity options, either to a PC via the USB Auto Connect that doesn’t require any kind of additional software or directly to a PictBridge compatible printer, like the Olympus P-11 Digital Photo Printer. The camera also comes with the included Olympus Master software that allows users to manage and edit their photos.

The camera produces only average image quality reported to other 6-megapixel digital cameras but the images are sharp and have good White Balance and color saturation although the edges can be a little soft. The 3x optical zoom offers enough flexibility to most amateur photographers but unfortunately shows visible signs of barrel distortion and picushioning at the extreme ends of the lens. Noise levels begin to become visible even at ISO 100 but are not disturbing until higher ISO settings.

As long as the subject is situated in the flash range, approximately 4 meters (12ft), indoor photos are sharp and well exposed. Certainly indoor shooting is the strongest quality of the Olympus FE-120 digital camera, especially when shooting portraits from about 3 meters (8-10 ft) away.

The video capabilities of the FE-120 can be a little disappointing as the maximum resolution of the filmed movie clips is the 320x240 and the recording is without sound. On the other hand the zoom can be used during movie recording and the movie clips show only minor traces of compression artifacts and noise.