6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Good camera for beginners
Date of Review: Apr 17, 2008
The Bottom Line: For the price paid this was a decent upgrade. The availability of high capacity memory cards helped overcome this cameras flaws.
I purchased this camera as a replacement to my older Olympus D-490 model. The camera itself is as good as most on the market today however the memory cards have become obsolete. I saw an ad for the FE-210 on sale at Office Max for $69.99 and decided to check it out. In store it had several noticeable features such as the 2.5 inch color LCD screen and the image stabilization mode as well as 7mb of built in memory. The size of the camera was also impressive at 3.5 inches wide by 2.5 inches high and less than 2 inches thick. The 7.1 megapixels, 4x digital zoom and 3x optical zoom are pretty standard features for most digital cameras these days. The most important aspect for me was the fact that this camera uses xD memory cards for which my laptop has a card reader. When I opened the package there were a few more pleasant surprises. In the box with the camera was a USB cable so I could directly connect the camera to the computer without having to remove the card. I also discovered that there was a built in help guide directly on the camera as well as having a feature that automatically optimizes the camera in different environments: sport, indoor, candlelight, self-portrait, sunset, fireworks, behind glass, cuisine, documents and auction. Before going out and using it as a camera I took advantage of its video function. I made a small video of the fish in my aquarium displayed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWpVcabIsAo .For a digital camera it does a decent job of capturing video. The first time I really used the camera for photographs (200+) is when I started noticing a few of the flaws. Normally I photograph stationary objects so all of my pictures should be relatively clear and in frame. However I noticed a few were horribly out of frame due to a very slow shutter speed. Slow shutter speed also becomes a problem when trying to photograph in low light situations regardless of settings. Another flaw showed up a few days later when the batteries completely died. Since there is no view finder you have to align the shot using the LCD screen and that just eats through batteries. Rechargeable batteries are recommended. Another thing I have noticed is that when improving the quality from 640 x 480 to 2048 x 1536 the photos actually turn out blurrier than the lower quality photos.
