Olympus FE-5020 review

Olympus attempts to make feature-rich 12MP compacts more accessible than ever...

Aimed at the entry level market, the FE-5020's wider than average 24-120mm (f3.3 – 5.8) lens does well to get you in among the action, but sadly a shutter lag and accentuated in poor low-lighting often mean you're a fraction too late to capture that all important magic moment. In fact, it seems no matter what Olympus' latest budget-friendly point-and-shoot tries it almost always comes up just short with a frustrating combination of niggles or near misses. This is particularly frustrating because underneath all its shortcomings there's a great camera fighting to get out.

With its smooth, sheen finish, small form factor and light weight, were it not for poor low-light capabilities it would be the perfect party camera to slip almost unnoticed into your back pocket or clutch bag to capture a raucous night on the town or romantic evening escape. The 2.7 inch screen auto-adjusts in brightness and shows a decent amount of detail without compromising the rear face of the camera in terms of usability. The usual spread of controls is present and correct and the directional pad features a decent selection of modes ensuring macro, flash, exposure compensation and self-timer are front and centre. One of the few handling complaints we could level at the FE-5020 comes as part of Olympus' decision not to include a mode dial. Instead the user must repeatedly tap the camera mode button to cycles a menu screen from intelligent Auto, Program, video capture, scene mode and digital image stabilisation. Sadly, moving from one end of the selection to the other is a frustratingly slow and cumbersome affair and every button click is accompanied by at least a half-second delay before you're sure the camera has registered your touch. This often led us to press the button causing us to miss our desired setting completely and have to re-cycle through the menu again. To further compound usability problems in this regard there's no direct short-cut to the 14 scene modes supported, so not only do you have to cycle through the various shooting modes, but once Scene Mode has been selected, you then have to contend with a further cycling sub-menu. To say an impromptu fireworks display could go almost completely un-captured because of this wouldn't be an unreasonable overstatement.

Besides that particularly frustrating dial-less shortcoming, on the whole usability is quite sound. The menu system is clear and concise and is geared for absolute beginners in respect of visual and even real-time displays of various effects broken down on screen (including Olympus' Magic Filters and exposure compensation). The on screen display includes the all important rule of thirds if you want help with composition (a small, but vitally important feature often omitted from models in this modest price range), not to mention a solid showing of mode and shooting info that doesn't eat too far into the screen or impede the framing of shots. It seems perfectly obvious that Olympus wants to capture the part of the market upgrading from a camera phone, since the FE-5020 comes replete with a microSD compatibility out of the box. While it's probably also a move to offer further choice beyond their much-loathed xD-Picture Card format as much as anything else, compared to your average high-end camera phone the FE-5020 is a stellar performer. Compared to some slightly more expensive 12MP compacts however, our first-hand shooting experience didn’t really sing its praises.

It seems the slow response that plagues the shooting mode button also causes great trouble for the response time from the shutter button. While it seems the FE-5020 has no problem in finding focus in short order, when it comes to fully pressing the shutter there's a noticeable lag in response that does it – and you – a great disservice. With an ISO range starting from just 64 we’d hope for a strong showing here, but actually noise was clearly evident in our shots even at ISO 400, which was the source of much frustration from our preliminary macro shoot which otherwise would have gone quite smoothly.

While the FE-5020 performed admirably in ideal conditions, we found its low-light and high-speed shooting capabilities sorely lacking. Still, at this price performance was never going to push the technical envelope, and it certainly offers the beginner a good blend of help and assistance.