Updated 11 Feb, 2012, 4:06 pm IST

REVIEWS / POINT AND SHOOT / OLYMPUS IMAGING INDIA PVT. LTD.

Olympus FE-170

22 Nov, 2006, 11:03 am IST | Gagan Gupta | Point and Shoot

Getting back to the negative part I mentioned earlier in the section, the FE-170 has some serious issues with respect to color and image clarity in anything less than bright lighting. I took a few test shots in a cloudy area of a hill-station as well as other shots in evening lighting, and they all seemed to have a reddish overlay.

At first I thought there was something wrong with my white-balance setting, but on further navigation through the camera's options, I realized that it doesn't offer any white-balance presets, so you're stuck with what the camera has to offer by default.

The mysterious red overlay appeared only during cloudy light settings, but there was a lack of sharpness on photos clicked in anything less than perfectly bright light. Looking at the sample image below I think its fair to compare the quality (or the lack of it) I got in this particular picture to what I would expect from a cheap CMOS sensor based phone camera shot.

Conclusion
The thing is, even if the FE-170 had the best features ever to grace a digital camera, it's all a waste if the photo quality end up being bad. The drawback in its image quality makes the FE-170 very hard to recommend to anyone.

It's available at a street price of around Rs. 8,000, but I suggest you try something better in the same budget range, or stick your your trusty old phone camera instead.

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Tags: Olympus , FE-170 , digital camera , digicam

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