Apr 23, 2009
Olympus FE45 Review
I’ve posted my review of the Olympus FE45. The FE45 is one of Olympus’ latest low cost entry-level digital cameras, it features 10 megapixels, 3X optical zoom, a 2.5 inch LCD and a relatively simple set of point-and-snap features. There’s also the Olympus FE45 photo gallery I’ve put online.
DPInterface Olympus FE45 Review
Brad Soo – April 23rd, 2009
Perhaps one of Olympus’ other past times (besides making compact and appealing digital SLRs) is coming up with new entry-level fixed lens cameras. Early this year, they unleashed a whole bunch of FE-series cameras – in fact, it was quite a number, but only three or four “main” models of the series made it to their press releases. The Olympus FE45 is one of those models, and it features 10 megapixels, a 3X optical zoom lens, 2.5 inch LCD, a decent VGA movie mode and point-and-shoot operation. Find out how the camera performs now.
Size and Weight
(185.2) 92.1 x 62.0 x 31.1 mm (140 g) – Canon PowerShot A480
(171.0) 97.0 x 56.0 x 18.0 mm (100 g) – Casio Exilim S5
(173.7) 91.5 x 60.5 x 21.7 mm (130 g) – Fujifilm FinePix A150
(164.4) 91.0 x 56.0 x 17.4 mm (97 g) – Fujifilm FinePix J20
(173.2) 95.5 x 58.5 x 19.2 mm (115 g) – Kodak EasyShare M340
(186.5) 96.5 x 61.0 x 29.0 mm (135 g) – Nikon Coolpix L20
(163.0) 89.5 x 55.5 x 18.0 mm (100 g) – Nikon Coolpix S220
(166.6) 93.0 x 55.8 x 17.8 mm (108 g) – Olympus FE3010
(182.0) 93.8 x 61.5 x 26.7 mm (112 g) – Olympus FE45
(188.5) 96.7 x 62.0 x 29.8 mm (128 g) – Panasonic Lumix LS85
(181.0) 97.5 x 60.0 x 23.5 mm (110 g) – Pentax Optio E70
(172.7) 93.1 x 55.7 x 23.8 mm (135 g) – Sony Cyber-shot S950
All the weight figures above show when the camera is empty without a battery or memory card
The Olympus FE45 is one of the larger budget cameras out there, since it uses AA batteries. The camera is fairly slim on its the left side, but increases in depth towards the right, where the battery/memory card compartment is located.
Box contents
The Olympus FE45 comes with the usual “in-the-box” items for a digital camera:
- 2 AA alkaline batteries
- microSD to xD-Picture card adapter
- Wrist strap
- USB and A/V cables
- Camera software CD
- User’s manual
The Olympus FE45 has 19 MB of built-in memory and supports xD-Picture cards natively as well as microSD cards via the bundled adapter. I’d recommend getting at least a 2 GB memory card with the camera to begin with.
470 shots – Canon PowerShot A480
150 shots – Fujifilm FinePix A150
165 shots – Fujifilm FinePix J20
320 shots – Kodak EasyShare M340
440 shots – Nikon Coolpix L20
180 shots – Nikon Coolpix S220
180 shots – Olympus FE5010
550 shots – Panasonic Lumix LS85
620 shots – Pentax Optio E70 (Using lithium batteries)
330 shots – Sony Cyber-shot S950
All the cameras above are rated with rechargeable batteries with LCD on according to CIPA Standard
The Olympus FE45 uses AA batteries and comes with two non-rechargeable alkaline ones. I’d recommend getting a set of AA NiMH rechargeable batteries and a charger so things will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly in the long run. Olympus has had nothing to say about the Olympus FE45’s battery life, but based on my testing with a set of 2500 mAh NiMH batteries, the camera managed to take around 390 pictures before the “low battery” notice appeared.
Accessories
The only accessories available for the Olympus FE45 are an AC adapter and various camera cases.
Camera Tour
The Olympus FE45 is a small, mostly plastic entry-level camera with surprisingly decent build quality (Except the compartment door). The camera is shaped nicely so you can get a good grip of it – the only gripe I have here is the rather small “OK” center button. I also wish that the bottom compartment came with a latch for the batteries, so they won’t come out when swapping memory cards.
The Olympus FE45 comes in your choice of silver, black or blue.
The Olympus FE45 features the “we’ve all seen this before” 36 – 108 mm, 3X optical zoom lens. It’s been around for a while, used by different camera makers (Casio, Olympus, Nikon, Pentax…) and branded under the respective manufacturers’ names. The lens’ aperture range of f3.1 to f5.9 is slow and there’s no image stabilization system here.
Heading up to the upper right side of the lens, you’ll spot the FE45’s flash and self-timer lamp. The flash is quite powerful at wide-angle, reaching 10 cm to 4.2 m (ISO 800), but less so at telephoto as it covers just 60 cm to 2.2 m. There’s also the camera’s microphone to the right of the “Olympus” logo.
The Olympus FE45 has a decent-sized 2.5 inch LCD on the back. The screen is sharp with 230,000 pixels and has good visibility in low-light. Outdoor visibility was just as good, as you can brighten the screen with the press of a button.
To the right of the screen are the FE45’s behind-clear plastic buttons. First, there’s the zoom controller which operates the camera’s 3X lens and playback zoom. Below that is the DISPLAY/help button, which toggles on-screen information in shooting/playback and also brings up help tooltips for menu items.
Before we cover the navigation pad, you’ll also see dedicated buttons for entering shooting and playback modes respectively. Now we come to the five-way navigation pad:
- Up – Exposure compensation (+/-2 exposure in 1/3 step increments)
- Down – Self-timer (Off, on – 12 seconds)
- Left – Macro (Off, normal macro, super macro)
- Right – Flash setting (Auto, auto with redeye reduction, on, off)
- Center – Function menu/Set
The function menu on the camera is brought up by pressing the center button on the navigation pad:
- White balance (Auto, daylight, overcast, tungsten, fluorescent 1,2 & 3)
- ISO sensitivity (Auto, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600)
- Image size and compression
The final 2 controls are the MENU and Backlight Boost buttons. The backlight boost button raises LCD brightness to the highest setting for better visibility outdoors, and doubles to delete photos in playback mode.
Over here you’ll see the power on/off and shutter buttons.
On this side is the FE45’s single connectivity port for both USB and A/V Out connections.
At the bottom of the Olympus FE45 is its metal tripod mount and battery/memory card compartment. The door here is plastic with a metal hinge but it still doesn’t feel sturdy.
Taking pictures (Shooting mode)
The Olympus FE45 tells you a decent amount of things in its shooting mode screen. You get to see shooting info and exposure details, but no live histogram or battery indicator (until the very last minute).
The image resolution options available on the Olympus FE45 are 10 MP, 5 MP, 3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP, VGA and widescreen, along with two image compression options: Fine and Normal. I’d recommending pairing up full 10 MP resolution with Normal compression for taking pictures.
The Olympus FE45 features the same backbones but with more fancy graphics menu system Olympus put into their cameras this year. The camera is totally point-and-shoot so there’s really nothing much to tweak or play around with in the menu.
In addition, the Olympus FE45 features a stripped-down version of Perfect Shot Preview, called Exposure compensation preview – which does exactly what it sounds: showing you the different effects of exposure compensation, real-time. The camera also features Face Detection which allows the camera to detect up to 16 faces.
There’s also Intelligent Auto mode which identifies the scene you’re shooting and automatically picks one of five scene modes (Portrait, landscape, night portrait, macro or sports). Of course, you can always pick a scene mode yourself from the handful of em available on the FE45. Selectable scene modes include portrait, landscape, night scene, night + portrait, sports, indoor, candle, self portrait, sunset, fireworks, cuisine and documents.
To compensate for the lack of an optical or sensor-shift image stabilization system on the FE45, Olympus has included a Digital Image Stabilization mode on the camera. DIS doesn’t even come close to the real thing in reducing blur as it merely boosts ISO as high as needed (which happens to introduce a lot of noise into pictures) – you’d be better off picking an ISO speed yourself.
The Olympus FE45 features two macro modes: normal and super macro. Normal macro has a minimum focusing distance of 10 cm at wide-angle and 60 cm at telephoto, while super macro allows you to get much closer – down to 5 cm from your subject with the lens locked at the wide-angle position.
Video Recording
The Olympus FE45 has an unremarkable movie mode that records VGA (640 x 480) video clips at 30 FPS with sound up to 2 GB. To do this, Olympus states you’ll need either a Type M or Type H xD-Picture card; otherwise, movie clips will be limited to 10 seconds (!) per clip.
However, there are no memory card type requirements if you drop frame rate to 15 FPS, drop resolution to QVGA (320 x 240) or both. You can’t operate zoom or focus while recording video. Movie quality was just decent, acceptable for uploading online or sharing with friends.
Performance
All performance testing of the Olympus FE45 was performed using a 1 GB Olympus Type H xD-Picture card.
The Olympus FE45 boots up within 2 seconds, which is average. Focusing is typically sluggish; with times ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 seconds in even decent lighting and the camera couldn’t even focus in low-light!
- Shot-to-shot speed – 1 shot every 3.2 seconds, below average
- Flash recharge time using a fully charged battery – 6 seconds on average
The Olympus FE45 lacks any sort of continuous shooting mode. The camera’s lens moves from wide-angle to telephoto in just 2.2 seconds. The Olympus FE45 performance was most unimpressive and slow. You’ll definitely have to wait for a bit after taking each photo.
Image Quality
Time for the most crucial part of the review, image quality:
When I first took the Olympus FE45 out of the box and started taking pictures, I thought my unit was faulty when I got crummy, blurry photos on the LCD. Turns out the FE45 shows a really low-resolution (as in horrible quality) post-shot review image on the LCD after a photo is taken. Switch to normal playback mode and you’ll see that things turned out just fine so I’m not sure what’s up with that.
The Olympus FE45 produces clean shots at ISO 100 but noise already gets introduced into photos at ISO 200. Come ISO 400, and image quality becomes fairly noisy, marking the limit of usable ISO settings. Anything higher than that, and there’s too much noise for pictures to be used, even for small prints, and there’s a drop in color saturation at ISO 1600.
Lens distortion levels with the camera were mild while there was noticeable chromatic aberration (color fringing) in both the test chart and day-to-day shooting situations. The issue I was most concerned about were purplish/blue-ish tints plaguing photos at times (most prominent in dark line-like details) Edge softness levels were a tad above average. Redeye was also a bit of an issue here.
Thanks to mainly its lens, the Olympus FE45 produces mediocre image quality. In fact, I don’t think noise levels here are as bad as previous FE-series cameras but lens flaws still remain – color fringing and “the bluish tint” are the biggest criminals here. Olympus also seem to have done away with the redeye removal feature here on this budget model, resulting in redeye in some cases.
Photo gallery
Check out full-sized, unedited photos in the Olympus FE45 photo gallery!
Playback
The Olympus FE45 has a simple playback mode. You can play back photos individually or in sets of 4, 9, 16 or 25 thumbnails. As usual, things like print marking, simple slideshow, image cropping, resizing and rotation are all available. There’s also playback zoom where you can magnify photos up to 10X. Perhaps the only “fancy” feature here would be Shadow Adjustment, which allows you to brighten dark areas of your photos at the cost of more noise.
Besides the date and resolution of your photos, the Olympus FE45 doesn’t tell you anything about your photos at all.
Conclusion
The Olympus FE45 is a 10 megapixel entry-level model with a 2.5 inch LCD and 3X zoom. Unfortunately, the FE45 falls short of what a digital camera is suppose to do – take good picture. For about the same price, there are still some capable cameras out there which can do better than this one.
To get straight to the point, image quality here was unimpressive, performance was lacking (there isn’t even any burst mode) and hey, there’s even a requirement to shell out extra bucks for a high-speed xD-Picture card if you want to use the VGA movie mode at full 30 FPS.
There aren’t many positive notes here. There’s Intelligent Auto mode, a feature that’s becoming widespread on most cameras and help tooltips for shooting functions. The camera supports two kinds of memory cards: the proprietary and expensive xD-Picture cards and the more commonly used micro SD cards. There’s also a 2.5 inch LCD which has good visibility but the camera offers little shooting/playback info on its display and ultra-low resolution post-shot review images after a shot is taken.
Sorry, the Olympus FE45 compromises too many things to deserve my recommendation here. There are lots of similarly priced sub-$150 cameras out there which you should look at, with a handful able to offer much better quality and value than this one.
What’s hot:
- Intelligent Auto mode and picture taking help tooltips
- Supports xD-Picture and microSD cards (via included adapter)
- Decent battery life (other cameras using AA batteries do better)
- Good screen visibility in low/bright light
What’s not:
- Below average image quality
- No optical/sensor-shift image stabilization
- Low resolution image review, lack of shooting/playback information
- Paltry performance
- Lacking any burst mode
- So-so movie mode, memory card requirement
Recommended Accessories:
- 2 GB xD-Picture or micro SD card
- 2 AA NiMH rechargeable batteries and a charger
Related articles:
- Olympus FE310 Review
- Olympus FE370 Review
- Olympus FE3010 Review
- Olympus FE320 Review
- Olympus FE5010 Review
Hi,
I would have to say this is an excellent review of olympus fe-45. One of the best i have seen so far
Unfortunately i read it after purchasing the camera.
But 1 cannot understand 1 thing. U have mentioned that it can take around 390 pictures before battries(NimH 2500) get empty. I am using camelion NimH battries(2700 mah) and with flash turned on, these fully charged battries only last around 20-30 pictures.
can u please tell me how did it take around 390 pictures? was flash turned off?
N please tell which battries are u using.
thanks alot.
Excelente analisis de la FE-45, pero yo también he leído esto después de comprar la cámara. Yo la compré porque antes tenía una cámara Olympus de carrete, Infinito Stylus, y tomaba excelentes fotos con ella. Pero desde la primera foto con la FE-45, me di cuenta que esta cámara toma fotos pobres, mediocres, y en la pantalla no presenta mucha información. Las pilas Energizer de Litium me duraron mas de 100 fotos, pero con las de NiMH duran menos. Pero eso se resuelve teniendo en el bolsillo mas de 6 u 8 pilas AA, o comprando las de Litio, que duran 7 veces mas y pesan 30% menos, esto es problema pequeño. Pero el problema mayor es la calidad de las fotos. Eso no se resuelve.
Gracias por el analisis de la FE-45. Ahora sé que no hay que comprar cámaras baratas.
Hi Daniel, before I reply, here’s a translation of your comment for the convenience of DPInterface’s english readers
Daniel Carrion’s comment (translation to English from Spanish)
“Excellent analysis of the FE-45, but I read this after buying the camera. I bought it because I once had an Olympus, Infinity Stylus, and took great pictures with it. But from the first picture with the FE-45, I realized that this camera takes poor photos, mediocre, and the screen does not present much information. Lithium Energizer batteries lasted me over 100 photos, but with NiMH batteries last less. But that is resolved by having carrying 6 or 8 AA batteries, or buying the Lithium batteries, that last 7 times more and weigh 30% less, this is small problem. But the greatest problem is the quality of the photos. That is not resolved.
Thanks for the analysis of the FE-45. Now I know not to buy cheap cameras.”
I hope my translation came out accurate? Thank you for your comment anyway, muchas gracias
. There are actually some ‘cheap’ cameras that perform fairly well (for the price), like the Canon A-series, Panasonic’s FS-series (not super cheap, but still low in price), etc. Did you return, exchange or keep your FE-45 camera in the end?
¿Te devolución, cambio o mantener tu FE-45 de la cámara?
Hi Brad
Traslation in very good. It is exactly all I want to say.
I’m going to keep this camera, maybe I’ll give this to any personal enemy, ja ja ja , really I don’t know what decision to make. I bought two weeks ago, and I thought I was a bad photographer.
If you like, You can include this in my comments, Brad, and thank you for your recomendations.
My English is very bad, excuse me. Im from Lima, Peru
Daniel
“Excellent analysis of the FE-45, but I read this after buying the camera. I bought it because I once had an Olympus, Infinity Stylus, and took great pictures with it. But from the first picture with the FE-45, I realized that this camera takes poor photos, mediocre, and the screen does not present much information. Lithium Energizer batteries lasted me over 100 photos, but with NiMH batteries last less. But that is resolved by having carrying 6 or 8 AA batteries, or buying the Lithium batteries, that last 7 times more and weigh 30% less, this is small problem. But the greatest problem is the quality of the photos. That is not resolved.
Thanks for the analysis of the FE-45. Now I know not to buy cheap cameras.”