In a word, the Olympus FE-115 is slow. After a wake-up time of 3.7 seconds, the camera's shutter lags 1.5 seconds even in bright light and 1.9 seconds in dim light. Our lab tests displayed a whopping shot-to-shot time of 8.6 seconds, and in the field, we could fire off a shot, at best, about once every 4 seconds.
After all that waiting, the Olympus FE-115 produces uneven image quality. Its automatic white balance manages to neutralize incandescent lighting accurately, without the yellowish pall produced by many cameras. Unfortunately, heavy JPEG compression artifacts ended up obscuring fine details from many of our field-test images. Our lab shots seemed noise-free, but since we couldn't manually select the ISO, we couldn't run it through our usual gamut of noise tests.
The Olympus FE-115 is strictly for patient, forgiving photographers willing to sacrifice performance and image quality for simplicity. Unless you're truly afraid of choices, you can find much better cameras in the same price range. Canon's far more flexible, slightly lower-resolution PowerShot A430 is a fine example.
What You'll Pay
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