Olympus FE-3010 – A Slow Performer
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Good photo quality for its class, great attractive looks.
Thumbs Down:
Extremely slow performance.
Inside the Trunk:
Utilities & drivers, Olympus Master, hand strap, microSD to XD adapter, included cables USB cable and A/V cable.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
FE-3010 is a 12 mega pixels camera, light sensitivity options include ISO 100-1600, ISO auto, has 4x digital zoom, shooting programs include night scene with portrait, under water wide 1/2, under water macro, self portrait, portrait mode, sports mode, night scene, anti shake, landscape, fireworks, cuisine documents, sunset, indoor, candle. Maximum shutter speed is 1/2000 second, minimum shutter speed is 4 seconds, white balance presets include Fluorescent light (warm white), Fluorescent light (cool white), Fluorescent light (daylight), Tungsten light, Sunlight, Overcast.
Video are stored in formats of MJPEG and AVI, images are stored in JPEG format, video capture resolution options are AVI – 320 x 240, AVI – 640 x 480. Image resolution options are JPEG 1920 x 1080, JPEG 640 x 480, JPEG 1280 x 960, JPEG 1600 x 1200, JPEG 2048 x 1536, JPEG 2560 x 1920, JPEG 3968 x 2976. The camera has zoom lens – 6.3 mm – 18.9 mm – F/3.1-5.9, with focal length of 6.3 mm – 18.9 mm, minimum focus range is 23.6 inches, macro focus range is 5 cms, lens aperture is F/3.1-5.9, has 3x optical zoom.
Additional features include Automatic Pixel Mapping (APM), Digital image stabilization, Display brightness control, RGB primary color filter, Digital noise reduction, Digital image rotation, USB 2.0 compatibility, YouTube capture mode, PRINT Image Matching, Built-in help guide, PictBridge support, Resizing an image, Cropping an image, Audio recording, Face detection, Direct print, DPOF support. The camera has 2.7 inch TFT LCD screen. The connectors on the camera include Composite video/audio output, USB.
There is a xD-Picture Card slot on the device. The device is powered by Li-ion rechargeable battery and supports Olympus LI-42B batteries.
Razzle Dazzle:
Even though not the best performers, the FE-3010 has down right sexy looks with the sleek and slim exteriors. It can easily fit in to tinniest of pants pockets due to the small size. It comes in two color choices black for men and pink has to be for the ladies.
Inside Dope:
Ultra compact cameras have their own ups and downs. On the positive side, they are easy to operate, are lightweight, small, inexpensive and the best choice if you want to shoot pictures to put it on social networking websites. However they have a lot of shutter lag, the photo quality is quite poor. We found the camera to be exceptionally slow in shutter lag, in fact this is the slowest camera that we have ever seen. If your subjects are impatient and move away from the camera within a second of the capture, you might get damaged photos. Prints look good as long as you stay inside the 4×6 size.
Most of the buttons on the camera are housed on the right of the display like LCD backlight boost/delete button, menu key, four way navigation button with Function/OK key in the middle, playback and shooting mode keys, info/display button and a tiny zoom rocker. You get a shooting mode specific menu when you press the Function/OK button but we were disappointed to see only 4 adjustable settings there. The menu in general is very user friendly however there are not a lot of settings that you can play around with.
The slot on the camera is for xD cards, Olympus still doesn’t give a microSD card slot. The problem with the xD cards is that they don’t come in bigger capacities, 2 GB is all you get. Fortunately there is a bundled converter which lets you plug in microSD cards as well.
You will have to save your settings on the camera because if you don’t, the next time you switch on the camera you will get a default Program Auto mode. In this mode you get control over timer, flash, white balance and ISO exposure compensation. We liked the way Olympus showed us real time changes that we did over white balance and exposure settings. There are 15 scene modes to choose from and it also has three modes for underwater shooting (this unit is not water proof, you will have to invest in a separate protective case which costs nearly the same as this camera) If you are confused about which scene mode to choose from there is the Intelligent Auto option to your rescue which detects the environment and chooses the scene mode by itself. For shooting movies all you get is a VGA quality mode, as expected you cannot use the optical zoom of the camera and all you get is digital zoom. For boosting the ISO, it has Digital Image Stabilization option but we would recommend you not to use it.
The camera as said before is the slowest we have ever seen. It takes 2.5 seconds to wake up and start shooting. Shot to shot times was 7.3 seconds with flash turned off and 8.7 seconds with it turned on. This is for xD card, if you put a microSD card, the times are slashed to half. We don’t know why but it is quicker when you use the microSD card. The shutter lag is extremely slow with 1.2 seconds in low light conditions and 0.9 seconds in bright environment. This big lag is certainly not expectable when you are shooting small children, pets or sports. There is no burst or continuous shooting mode but we are not complaining about this because it would have been unusable due to slow performance.
The photo quality of the camera is quite good, the colors are natural looking, white balance performance is solid. Pictures are good up to ISO 800. This camera is a strict no for action photography, prints bigger than 5X7 inches and low light shooting photos. However if you are going to put photos on social networking websites, the FE-3010 is a good option.
Nitty Gritty:
We would advice you not to buy this camera owing to the price and the low features. The high shutter lag is certainly a deal breaker for this device. We are still clueless why the camera performs so slow when using the xD card. There are lots of other cameras giving better performance at this price.
