Olympus FE-5020

At first glance, the Olympus FE-5020 is a compact camera packed with plenty of the brand’s technology, such as a versatile 5x optical zoom (24-120 mm in 35mm equivalent), a 2.7” LCD screen, selected focusing options, artistic filters and the 12-Megapixel sensor that we unfortunately know only too well. But is the FE-5020 a good deal?

Handling
The camera’s so light that it feels a bit strange to handle at first. In fact, like us you might find yourself checking you’ve definitely remembered to load the battery and memory card. At just 120 g, the FE-5020 is barely heavier than a smartphone, and it’s so slim and light that you could almost forget you’ve got it in your pocket. Its decidedly plastic finish doesn’t stop this compact camera being pleasant to use. However, its design is perhaps a bit unoriginal with a classic two-button zoom and four-way controller for selecting the various modes (flash, macro, playback etc.), not to mention an on/off button that’s just too small. There’s no scroll wheel or zoom lever, and even though the zoom is quite fast, it’s noisy and difficult to adjust with accuracy.

Picture quality is smooth when lining up shots on the LCD screen and the 230,000-dot definition isn’t really a problem on a 2.7” display. In low-light conditions, the picture is fairly clear although very jerky.


The menus are pretty standard too, apart from a few extra options such as exposure compensation. There’s also a Magic Filters function that displays four versions of the same photo showing the effect of the different built-in filters. It’s a nice touch, even if the screen’s a bit too small to really appreciate the full effect of the various settings. The i-Auto automatic scene recognition function is fast but the modes aren’t always appropriate.

Responsiveness

On the whole, the FE-5020 didn’t do too badly. It’s certainly not the fastest camera around, but it gets good average scores with no major drawbacks. Focusing is fairly quick and smooth in wide-angle, but becomes sluggish in telephoto (f/5.8 etc.). Automatic subject tracking works well for people, but loses other subjects a bit too easily. Plus, as the burst mode on entry-level cameras can often be slow, it seems Olympus has got round the problem by simply not including one.

Image Quality

The 24-120 mm optical zoom is one of the most attractive features of the Olympus FE-5020, although even that is nothing more than average. At the lowest sensitivity setting, the centre of the shot comes out reasonably well with a fair bit of detail, but on the whole the pictures lack sharpness and would need to be touched up afterwards to get decent large-format prints.

Digital noise management isn’t a strong point for this Olympus compact camera, as although the photos do come out OK up to about 400 ISO, some granulation can be seen even at the lowest sensitivity setting (64 ISO). Typically, at 800 ISO the granulation and subsequent smoothing eat away at fine detail. At 1600 ISO the effect is blatant, although colour noise is minimal. So the results are nothing spectacular, but it’s fair to say that the FE-5020 performs better than other compacts on the market, like the Samsung PL70 or the Nikon Coolpix S220, for example.


It’s a shame Olympus decided not to include an optical or mechanical stabiliser. The digital system’s not really up to scratch and we couldn’t get a clear shot of Barbie in our test.


Although the FE-5020 has a super macro mode, we couldn’t seem to get any really close-up shots. This could have been due to a fault in the test camera or incorrect information about the focusing distance, but whatever the problem, it proved impossible to take a picture at 1 cm from the subject, as promised in the product documentation.

Video

Video certainly isn’t one of the FE-5020’s strengths with its basic VGA mode. Plus, the optical zoom doesn’t work when shooting video footage.