Though its performance was lackluster, the FE-250 can produce some great images with adequate lighting. Colors were accurate and neutral even indoors, a tricky thing to accomplish with a camera's automatic white balance. Fine details came through clearly, and we saw very little lens distortion. Even at high ISO settings, we didn't see much noise in our test photos. An antinoise algorithm kicks in at ISO 1600, so noise was actually lower at that setting than at ISO 800. Unfortunately, that algorithm seriously softens details, so you should stick to ISO 800 or lower when shooting.
Despite the Olympus FE-250's sluggish performance and almost complete lack of manual settings, it's still a great camera for new users. If you simply want to take decent photos and don't want to fiddle around with a lot of menus and buttons, it's a decent choice. Its price may seem a bit high for such a simple camera, but its photos look good, it's easy to use, and it's small enough to take almost anywhere.
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(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
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Olympus FE-250:
