Olympus FE-5030
The Olympus FE-5030 is a stylish, credit card sized camera featuring an unusually wide, 26-130mm equivalent zoom lens, a 14-megapixel sensor, mechanical image stabilisation, Advanced Face Detection, AF Tracking, four Magic Filters, SD card compatibility and a 2.7” rear LCD screen. Finished with a brilliant Double-Layered Crystal Shell, the FE-5030 is available in a choice of Indium Grey, Aquamarine Blue, Flamingo Pink and Pure White priced at £139.99. Compact cameras have made Compaq presario v6000 battery easy for all of us to click pictures in every situation, edit them, remove all red eyes and even upload it directly to our favourite networking sites. But most cameras turn out to be incapable of making pictures immune to blur or shake – though they may remove the blur at a digital level.
Thankfully the Olympus FE-5030 is capable of removing blur or shake from the picture at both the optical as well as digital level. This camera comes with a resolution of 14mp and a zoom range of 5x.Since colours reflect the personality of the person who carries it, this camera can be said to have a colour for each one of us. Its slim and easy to grip body, made tough with Double-Layered Crystal Shell finish, comes in various kaleidoscopic colours like Baby Pink, Sky Blue, Cool Green, Earth Brown, Metallic Silver and Midnight Black. This camera is equipped with Dual Image Stabilization function – which removes blur or shake from the picture at two levels – optically and digitally. It comes with a zoom capacity of 5x, with a 35mm equivalent ranging from 26mm to 130mm. HP 530 battery comes with magic filters which give your images an artistic touch. To make it all the more easy to operate for the user, this camera comes with an in-camera help guide. It comes with an internal memory of 48MB and is compatible with SD/SDHC cards.
The Olympus FE-5030 is a neat little digicam that's only marginally wider - though obviously thicker - than a credit card. Upon its announcement, Olympus was making big noise about its Double-Layered Crystal Shell finish - which, in all honesty, sounded like pure marketing blabber at first. However, the camera does indeed have a nacreous shine that makes Sony vgp-bps10a/b very eye-catching when you see it in person.Apart from that, the design is simple, almost minimalistic. The lens, which sits fully retracted into the body when the camera is not in use, occupies almost the entire right half of the face plate. Spanning a 35mm equivalent focal range of 26-130mm, it goes wider than most compact camera lenses, though not quite as wide as the 24mm of the older FE-5020 model. Its maximum aperture is a fast f/2.8 at the wide end but a disappointingly slow f/6.5 at full telephoto. Upon power-up, the lens extends in barely more than a second, protruding about an inch from the face plate. When you turn off the camera, the lens retracts with similar haste.
The rest of the front plate features a pinprick indicating a built-in microphone top right of the lens surround, a sliver of a window for the on-board flash and AF assist lamp, plus the indispensable Olympus and FE logos. The top panel offers even less in the way of controls, featuring only a small on/off button with a LED power indicator sitting right next to it, and an elongated shutter release.Overall, I have found the menu system of the Olympus FE-5030 easy to get used to, but painfully slow to navigate. Dell vostro 1500 battery takes too much time - and, often, too many button presses - to access important functions and change settings. As I have said above, one-button shortcuts to exposure compensation and ISO speed would really have been useful - these functions could easily have been mapped unto the Left and Right buttons of the four-way pad, for example.
I also find it a bit frustrating that you cannot pick an AF point manually - you either entrust the camera with this task (in iESP mode) or use the central AF point only. There is a third auto-focus mode as well, called AF Tracking, but I did not find it particularly useful in real life. Finally, I couldn't get the camera to display a histogram, either pre or post capture - apparently, the designers didn't think that the target customer would ever want to use this tool.Having said all that, the Olympus FE-5030 is at least competitively priced, and people trading up from a camera phone or a run-of-the-mill 3x zoom compact will surely appreciate things like image stabilisation or the super wide angle and versatile focal range of the lens. More advanced users looking for a pocket-sized HP pavilion dv2000 battery will, however, probably want to look for other options... ”