DPInterface Olympus FE340 Review
Brad Soo - September 25th, 2008

In the slew of cameras released by Olympus this year, there's the FE340: 8 megapixels with 5X optical zoom. It also features Perfect Shot Preview, a high range of ISO sensitivities and playback image editing. Is it worth it to pick up the Olympus FE340? Discover more about it now in the review.

Size and Weight

(200.6) 104.8 x 55.1 x 40.7 mm (165 g) - Canon PowerShot A460
(196.4) 101.2 x 63.8 x 31.4 mm (160 g) - Canon PowerShot E1
(163.8) 94.2 x 54.6 x 15.0 mm (113 g) – Casio Exilim S10
(168.0) 91.0 x 55.0 x 22.0 mm (110 g) - Fujifilm FinePix J10
(167.7) 92.0 x 56.5 x 19.2 mm (116 g) - Kodak EasyShare M883
(163.0) 90.0 x 55.0 x 18.0 mm (145 g) – Nikon Coolpix S210
(172.2) 96.9 x 57.5 x 17.8 mm (116 g) - Olympus Stylus FE340
(192.8) 97.5 x 62.0 x 33.3 mm (141 g) - Panasonic Lumix LZ10
(182.0) 98.0 x 59.0 x 25.0 mm (130 g) – Pentax Optio E60
(170.1) 91.4 x 58.4 x 20.3 mm (110 g) – Samsung SL201
(181.5) 91.4 x 61.0 x 29.1 mm (140 g) - Sony Cyber-shot S730
All the weight figures above show when the camera is empty without a battery or memory card

The Olympus Stylus FE340 fits right into the middle of the pack, and it features a larger than average 5X lens too!

Box packaging

With the Olympus FE340, you'll find in the box:

  • LI-42B rechargeable lithium-ion battery
  • Battery charger
  • Wrist strap
  • USB and A/V cables
  • Camera software CD
  • User's manual

The Olympus FE340 has an xD-Picture card slot, but only comes with 48 MB of internal memory. I would recommend getting at least a 2 GB memory card to begin with. High-speed cards don't make much a performance difference so you need not get one

The Olympus FE340 uses a single lithium-ion battery which lasts for approximately 240 shots per charger. While that's average for a camera which uses lithium-ion batteries, the FE340 does come in below average in the pack of AA-battery entry-level cameras below:

400 shots - Canon PowerShot A460
450 shots - Canon PowerShot E1
280 shots – Casio Exilim S10*
150 shots - Fujifilm FinePix J10*
200 shots - Kodak EasyShare M883*
220 shots – Nikon Coolpix S210*
240 shots – Olympus FE340*
200 shots – Olympus FE370*
460 shots - Panasonic Lumix LZ10
620 shots – Pentax Optio E60**
Not rated – Samsung SL201
440 shots - Sony Cyber-shot S730
* indicates the camera uses a proprietary lithium-ion battery
** the Pentax Optio E60's battery figure is based on lithium AA batteries

All the cameras above are rated with rechargeable batteries according to CIPA Standard

Extras

There aren't many accessories available for the FE340; only various camera cases and 'premium' colored wrist straps

Camera Tour

The Olympus FE340 is thin for an entry-level camera, and even thinner still when you consider it has a 5X optical zoom lens. The camera is easy to hold, has simple controls and a built-in guide which makes it perfect for first-time users. The Olympus FE340 comes in five colors: Silver, red, blue, pink and black. This one over here is the red model.

The Olympus FE340 features a 5X optical zoom lens, which is more than the standard 3X lenses on other cameras, equivalent to 36 – 180 mm and having an aperture range of f3.5 – f5.6.

Near the "5X optical zoom" label, there's a microphone for the camera's sound recording to the bottom right of the lens. To the left side of the Olympus FE340 is the self-timer lamp and flash, which has a working range of 10 cm to 3.9 m at ISO 800. No AF-assist light is to be found on the FE340.

The Olympus FE340 has a big bright 2.7 inch LCD unit on the back. It has 230,000 pixels so the images on the screen are sharp and fluid. The LCD is usable in low-light, though the boost wasn't as much as I expected, and it also can be used under bright light, with the backlight boost function.

Above the LCD are two buttons for the camera's modes: left button for shooting mode and the right one to enter playback light. The indicator light between the two buttons glows solid red in shooting mode and yellow for playback mode. When the light blinks, it shows the camera is processing a file.

The upper corner of the camera, where your right thumb goes, is the FE340's mode dial. The mode dial has the following modes available (going clockwise):

  • Program
  • Automatic
  • Movie mode
  • Scene modes
  • Landscape
  • Portrait
  • Digital image stabilization

Below the mode dial is the DISPlay button which toggles the information shown on the FE340's LCD display. The display button doubles to bring up the Olympus FE340's guide and help system - it's like a user's manual built-in into the camera itself and contains "how-to" tips about the shooting functions. There are also scene mode descriptions and information on menu items available. The guide feature on the FE340 can really help you in taking better pictures if you're a beginner.

Then you'll also see the five-way controller which also allows direct changes to these settings:

  • Up – Exposure compensation (+/- 2 EV in 1/3 steps)/Print marking in playback
  • Down – Self-timer for 12 seconds (Off/On)
  • Left – Macro mode (Off, macro, super macro)
  • Right – Flash setting (Off, on, auto, on with red-eye reduction)

The center FUNCtion button lets you quickly access several settings (most of them only available in Program mode):

  • Sub-mode (Automatic, program mode, digital image stabilization or portrait mode)
  • White balance (Auto, daylight, overcast, tungsten and three fluorescent modes)
  • ISO sensitivity (64, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200)
  • Image size and quality

The final two buttons are the MENU button (self-explanatory) and the backlight boost button which turns up the LCD display brightness in shooting mode, so you can see what you're framing outdoors. This same button also doubles to delete photos in playback mode.

On the top of the FE340, there are the camera power button and shutter button. The zoom controller is also wrapped around the shutter button.

There aren't any more buttons on the FE340, with the wrist strap mount and connector port for USB and A/V Out are located on the right side.

And this side of the FE340 is blank. The lens here is at full telephoto.

At the bottom of the Olympus FE340 is a plastic tripod mount, the camera's speaker and the battery/memory card compartment. The plastic tripod mount is located far away enough so you can change memory cards and batteries when the FE340 is attached onto a tripod.

Taking pictures (Shooting mode)

The Olympus FE340 has a simple display of info on the LCD: it shows basic camera settings but there's no live histogram or exposure information here (shutter speed and aperture indications).

You can select a range of image resolutions from 8 megapixels (with a widescreen 16:9 option) down to VGA with two compression options. The widescreen image option shoots at 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080) which is essentially two megapixels and enough to fit your television perfectly. The settings that I would normally use and recommend would be full resolution along with 'Fine' compression.

Perfect Shot Preview (which I suppose is now a standard feature on Olympus cameras) is available on the Olympus FE340. This splits the screen into four areas, each showing the photo effects of various settings. For example, when you select exposure compensation, Perfect Shot Preview shows the outcomes of different values of compensation simultaneously before you take a photo. So this actually allows you to preview effects and make changes to achieve the desired effect before taking a photo. It's a good thing Olympus introduced such a great feature; it saves a lot of time and hassle to take multiple photos with different settings and picking the best one.

The Olympus FE340 has a macro mode which lets you go as close as 10 cm to a subject at wide-angle and minimum 60 cm at full zoom - both of which aren't really 'macro' enough.

Besides the things you can change in the function menu, there's only one other item you can change: that's autofocus mode. You can choose between iESP automatic focusing or Face Detection AF. Other than that, you won't find any manual controls on this camera

 

There're many scene modes available on the FE340: Portrait, landscape, night portrait, night scene, sports, indoor, candle light, self-portrait, sunset, fireworks, cuisine, behind glass, document and auction. Face Detection is here of course, and so is Smile Shot (which was missing from the FE360 but available on the Stylus 1040) - which automatically takes three photos in a row when the camera detects a smile. A panorama mode on the camera guides you to take up to ten photos so they can be combined into a single large 'stitched' photo; one requirement here though: Panorama only works with an Olympus-branded xD-Picture card.

The Olympus FE340 doesn't have any sort of 'real' (optical or sensor) image stabilization; instead, there's digital image stabilization mode which just automatically boosts ISO. The side effect is a decrease in image quality. It's best to not use digital image stabilization and turn up ISO manually instead.

Video Recording

The Olympus FE340 has a very typical 30 FPS VGA movie mode with sound. If you wanna save space on your memory card or record longer video clips, you can also reduce the resolution to QVGA (320 x 240), cut the frame rate by half (15 FPS) or both.

There's nothing else to the movie mode: Autofocus and zoom are fixed while recording while brightness is automatically adjusted by the camera. Video and audio quality were average.

Performance

The Olympus FE340 takes its own sweet time to start up, taking almost 2.5 seconds. It doesn't focus too quickly either, taking around about half to a full second to focus; and the FE340 is most unwilling to autofocus in low-light because it just can't - no AF-assist lamp here to help.

Shot-to-shot speed - 1 shot every 2.9 seconds, below average
Flash recharge time using a fully charged battery – Usually around 6 seconds

And in another one of those frustrating moments that I've been having with entry-level cameras, here's comes another "hey, where's the burst mode?!!" - The FE340 lacks a burst mode... and I must say that it really needs one to make up for the slow shot-to-shot speeds.

In terms of lens zooming, the FE340 takes about 2.1 seconds to go from wide-angle to full zoom and around 1.7 seconds to power down. All-in-all, I feel pretty disappointed with the FE340's performance: the camera seems not in a hurry at all to do things, which really gets in the way and will frustrate (especially impatient) people easily.

Image Quality

Time to take a look at image quality tests with the Olympus FE340:


ISO 64 (f3.5, 1/6 sec)


ISO 100 (f3.5, 1/13 sec)


ISO 200 (f3.5, 1/25 sec)


ISO 400 (f3.5, 1/50 sec)


ISO 800 (f3.5, 1/100 sec)


ISO 1600 (f5.6, 1/80 sec)


ISO 3200 (f5.6, 1/160 sec)

We'll start out at ISO 64 which looks similar to ISO 100; very little noise over here. ISO 200 isn't that bad either and details still remain up till ISO 400 (Quite a different story here compared to the newer FE360 I reviewed two weeks back). At ISO 800, you'll witness some noise reduction coming in to play but image quality is still usable when downsized.

ISO 1600 shots start to get quite mushy looking; you can see noise reduction really at work here when images get soft. The image resolution is fixed at 3 megapixels or below at ISO 3200, not that you'd want to use it of course - photos at that setting are totally soft and blocky looking.

Given the proximity of the flash to the lens and the more-than-average 5X zoom range, you're bound to get some redeye and distortion with the FE340. Fortunately, there's a red-eye removal tool in playback (which I'll talk about later). Chromatic aberration (color fringing), which seems to have a lot to do with the lens on Olympus cameras of late, is not present on the FE340, so that's good. Overall image quality of the FE340 is good, there are little compromises and things that will annoy you - redeye- can be removed in playback.

Photo gallery

View full-sized photos in the Olympus FE340 photo gallery!

 

Playback

The FE340 has one of the more elaborate playback modes on the Olympus FE-series of cameras. Besides playing back stills and videos and very typical playback functions like image rotation, resizing, cropping, print marking and a simple slideshow, the FE340 features Perfect Fix mode.

Perfect Fix contains several (some of which are interesting) editing functions. There's red-eye fix and lighting fix which helps reduce red-eye and improve brightness respectively. Digital image stabilization editing tries to reduce blur in photos (it wasn't effective for me). Then there are things like Face Focus and Expression Edit which you don't see everyday... the latter literally 'turns frowns upside down' and deserves a LOL (laugh out loud) from me. So the camera can edit things you need to fix regularly (like red-eye) while throwing some expression changing fun into the mix.

Images can be displayed as single photos or in thumbnail sets of four, nine, sixteen or even twenty-five tiny little thumbnails! A useful calendar view is available too so you can see the days you've been out and about taking photos. For movie viewing, you can fast-forward and reverse, no editing functions for movies here.

The "My Favorites" feature is like an album that lets you store your favorite photos so you can quickly access them. Everything you need to know about your photos are displayed in playback, including exposure information (that was missing in shooting mode). There's also a shake indicator here.

Conclusion

The Olympus FE340 is a simple 8 megapixel camera for casual point-and-shoot purposes. The camera is powered by a lithium-ion battery (thus the thin design) and packs more zoom than you'll typically find on a camera like this. That'll be 5X optical zoom, though the FE340 could use some sort of 'real' image stabilization as opposed to the digital version which merely boosts ISO (you can do that yourself too).

There's a mode dial and generally not too many buttons to confuse the average user. And for those who are just starting out (or don't bother reading the manual), there's always the built-in guide feature. The Olympus FE340 is designed more for snapshots without fuss; it has various scene modes and no manual controls, at all. Perfect Shot Preview shows you the effects of photos before you hit the shutter button and there's smile detection which automatically takes 3 shots without you lifting a finger when the camera detects a smile.

Unfortunately some corners were cut while loading up the camera with fancy auto features like that, and the edit functions in playback... the Olympus FE340 lacks a burst mode and operates in a lackluster manner in terms of performance, that includes low-light auto focus and below average battery life.

Bottom line is, the Olympus FE340 is a very much automatic mode camera which can take some decently good shots straight out of the box BUT is not for the impatient or for snapping pets, kids, sports or anything that's moving quickly. If you're attracted to the fairly slim design with an above average 5X zoom lens, then fine. If you're looking for a budget camera that's good in all areas, then there are other (better) options out there, some even with 5-6X zoom lenses although not as compact as this camera.

What's hot:

  • Compact design available in five colors and above average 5X zoom
  • Easy to use - few buttons and built-in help
  • LCD viewable in various conditions (Especially with backlight boost)
  • Perfect Shot Preview
  • Hands-free smile detection automatically snaps smiles
  • Useful editing functions in playback
  • Many scene modes available
  • Good image quality till ISO 800

What's not:

  • No manual controls at all
  • Lacks 'real' image stabilization
  • Below average battery life
  • Burst mode is missing
  • Slow overall performance; poor low-light focusing
  • Plastic tripod mount, no USB 2.0 High-speed

Recommended Accessories:

  • 2 GB xD-Picture card
  • Spare rechargeable lithium-ion battery

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