I’ve owned several digital cameras including a few Olympus models and my latest is an Olympus FE-115 5MP Digital Camera with 2.8x Optical Zoom (11x seamless zoom with digital and optical combined). The FE-115 is the smallest digital camera with decent optics and memory that I’ve owned. It has a 5 megapixel sensor with resolution up to 2,560-by-1,920-pixels, capable of producing good quality 8×10 prints and excellent quality 6×8 prints. The movie mode works fine and the setup, which is similar to previous Olympus models, is very user friendly.
On the downside, I don’t like that it doesn’t have a conventional viewfinder, only the LCD screen. I know for a lot of users this won’t be a drawback at all, but for folks like me who grew up on conventional photography (I still own a Brownie and I’ve built pinhole cameras and made my own prints in a darkroom), the lack of a viewfinder takes some getting used to. I’m also a little put off that Olympus switched from Smart Media Cards to xD-Picture Cards, making the Smart Media Cards I already own essentially obsolete (outside using them with my old backup camera).
The camera has a “night mode”, which takes pictures with the greenish cast to the light that you’re used to seeing in night vision battlefield photos. I think this is more a special effect feature than something intended to be useful for night photography.
With new FE-115s available for just over $100, this camera is a great buy and more than capable of taking great pictures for holidays, vacations, family occasions of all sorts. It will fit a tripod for “serious” photography. One professional photographer I know said that despite the good quality he has to have a bigger camera, because his models don’t take a tiny camera seriously and sitting on a tripod this camera would look tiny.
Photo taken with the FE-115
(There are smaller camera phones, but they typically max out at a resolution around 320×240. I owned a smaller “credit-card” sized camera that produced really blurry no matter the distance or the resolution and I’ve got a “pen” camera with a 640×480 resolution, no zoom and only enough memory for a dozen pictures).
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