Olympus FE-300

Reviewed October 2007

Image Quality

The megapixel race is both remarkable and worrisome. Compact cameras such as the Olympus FE-300 (X-830 in Europe) now offer an image size that is, in terms of the number of millions of pixels available to capture an image, as large and even occasionally larger than what can be had with professional digital cameras. The difference, however, is that with the smaller sensors used in compact cameras, as the number of pixels packed into a chip augments, noise often increases as well, impacting the image quality.

While advanced controls over the way the image is captured are not part of the FE-300's assets, it does offer some interesting and innovative functions. One of these is the DIS Edit option found in the Perfect Fix section of the Playback mode. The function makes it possible to salvage — to some extent — a shot ruined by camera shake. There are limits to what can be accomplished with post-capture image processing, however, and equipping the FE-300 with a CCD shift or an optical image stabilizer might have been preferable.

Another mode that caught our attention was the Smile Shot mode, one of the Scene modes the FE-300 offers. The intriguingly named mode is described as a mode in which the camera "detects a smile from the subject" which causes it to capture 3 frames immediately. Whether because the oversimplified manual fails to explain the way the process works clearly, or because we were incapable of fathoming how it works, we found the FE-300 to happily snap away whether the subject was smiling, or frowning...

Much more positive, however, was the image quality the FE-300 produced when given a very well-lit subject.

Although at the highest image quality level, SHQ, the camera compresses images with a ratio that hovers around the 7:1 range, given good light — even a mix of light from ambient light and its flash — the FE-300 is able to produce the best image quality we have seen from a compact camera's 12-megapixel CCD to date.

Regrettably, only the 12 megapixel image size offers such a compression ratio.

All the other image sizes, including 16:9 designed to be seen on an HDTV, apply a compression that is approximately twice as strong, and which lowers the image quality by lowering the amount of detail.

As with some other recent compact cameras, the FE-300 offers a broad range of CCD sensitivities, starting at 50 ISO and extending up to 6400 ISO. And, like other compact cameras that offer very high sensitivities, at its highest levels, the image quality the FE-300 yields drops precipitously. At 6400 ISO, even with good light, the image is more like a watercolour than a photograph. Below 3200 ISO, the 800 and 1600 ISO levels produce a noisy image, but it can be useable if it is seen at a smaller size, or printed no larger than 4 x 6 inch (10 x 15 cm).

The lower range, and in particular 50 and 100 ISO, yields the highest image quality, while 200 and 400 ISO produce acceptable images with more noticeable shadow noise. As noted above, the least noisy level is 50 ISO, the CCD's lowest sensitivity. Even there, however, some noise can creep into the shadows of shots that are captured with less than bright light.

The FE-300 is equipped with a 3X optical zoom that provides it with a very standard range that is equivalent to a 35 to 105 mm. The wide angle end of the zoom exhibits a slight chromatic aberration when there are strongly contrasting elements in an image, but very little barrel distortion, even when the camera is set to Super Macro mode. The telephoto end gives no indication of any aberration, nor does it reveal any pincushion distortion. In fact, the telephoto end of the zoom yields very sharp images.

The FE-300 has a small but powerful flash that does an excellent job when extra light is needed, even when the sensitivity is set to 50 ISO, as the flash easily covers up to 2.5 to 3 m (8 to 10 ft). Moreover, with the sensitivity set to 200 ISO, the effective range of the flash can be increased considerably without too much of an increase in noise.

The Olympus FE-300 offers a lot of value for the money. The image quality the camera is capable of producing is, so far, the best we have seen in a 12-megapixel compact. Moreover, when so many compact cameras are equipped with only a tiny flash that barely throws light out to 2 m (6 ft), the FE-300's flash is actually effective.

The FE-300 deserves to become quite popular.