Labs

Olympus's entry-level digital camera makes a good first impression thanks to its 2.5in screen and straightforward controls. The mode dial includes a high-sensitivity setting, although the wobbly hand icon and the acronym "DIS" that appears on the screen might baffle inexperienced users. Another dial position labelled Guide presents various camera options as a series of tasks such as "brightening subject" and "blurring background". Sadly, these beginner-friendly options come at the expense of standard controls.

Exposure compensation is included,

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but there's no ISO speed control and no white balance setting. The latter would be forgivable if the camera's automatic white balance was reliable, but it isn't. Pictures taken in low artificial light had a strong yellow tint, and pictures taken using the flash sometimes looked blue. This is just the start of the FE-210's image quality troubles. Pictures suffered from soft focus that was bad enough to be clearly visible when printed on 4x6in photo paper, and image noise was noticeable even in shots taken in bright lighting conditions.

The FE-210 failed to recover any ground in our performance tests. It takes nearly five seconds to start up and take a picture, so you could easily miss the event you want to capture, and with the camera running it can capture just one image every four seconds. Browsing photos stored on an xD card was just as slow, although viewing four, nine, 16 or 25 pictures at a time makes it faster to find a specific shot. Video is recorded at a resolution of 640x480 pixels, but with no sound.

With poor performance, limited controls, soft focus and noticeable image noise, the FE-210 is poor value.