To help prevent ugly dead pixels, the Olympus FE-140 has an automatic pixel-mapping feature that analyzes the camera's sensor and notes specific pixels that show up as too light or too dark. Once recorded, the camera can compensate for those bad pixels when it processes images. Olympus puts pixel mapping on all of its digital cameras, but it's otherwise a rare feature for low-end snapshot cameras.
It won't win any speed contests, but the FE-140's performance will satisfy most casual shooters. After 3 seconds from power-on to the first shot, the FE-140 could snap one shot every 2.4 seconds. Even with the onboard flash enabled, the camera experienced just a 2.8-second shot-to-shot time. Shutter lag was good, lagging only 0.7 second with our high-contrast target and 1.3 seconds with our low-contrast subject.
The photos we took with the FE-140 were mediocre at best. It captured colors well, and its automatic white balance pleasantly surprised us by accurately reproducing indoor, incandescent lighting without the yellow pall typical of most cameras. Despite this nice touch, the images generally came out soft with fine details and noise, even in bright shots. Noise grew exponentially with the ISO-enhancing image-stabilization mode. If you don't want extremely grainy, speckled photos, you'll stick to well-lit subjects and keep image stabilization turned off.
The Olympus FE-140 is an extremely simple camera that will do almost everything for you. Unfortunately, this automation comes at the cost of any sort of manual control. It performs well enough, but the camera's mediocre pictures and near-total lack of manual control make it unsuitable for all but absolute beginners.
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Olympus FE-140:
