Olympus FE-180 Zoom Review

Rotating the Mode dial to the GUIDE position will bring up the built-in Shooting Guide on the LCD screen. It provides a detailed descriptions of various photographic scenarios, and will also set the camera with the touch of a button.

Here you can see the typical record mode screen. The "AUTO" indicates Auto exposure mode, in the center are the auto focus target marks, and across the bottom is image quality, SHQ = Super High Quality and there's enough space our xD card for 56 pictures. The blue vertical bar in the lower right corner of the viewfinder indicates the state of the camera's internal buffer; in this example it is empty, but becomes progressively green as the buffer fills.

When you half-press the shutter release it starts the autofocus process and if it locks you'll get the "focus OK" green icon (top left). If focus fail you will get a flashing green "can't focus" icon. The red lightning bolt icon indicates the flash is charged and ready, the white lightning bolt indicates fill flash mode.

Digital Image Stabilization mode is also located on the Mode dial (shaky hand symbol) and uses Olympus' Bright Capture technology, which boosts the ISO sensitivity. This keeps shutter speeds higher in order to reduce the blurring effects of camera shake or subject movement during the exposure. Image size is not reduced when using this feature.

Rotating the mode dial gives you access to these shooting modes.

Pressing the 4-way controller Left, Down or Right allows you to quickly change settings for Macro focus mode, Self-timer, and Flash mode.

You can access a variety of Scene modes by rotating the Mode dial to the SCN position. As you go through the Scene selections an image depicting the mode is shown and then a brief text explanation of the mode is presented (shown above.) You can choose from 13 different exposure modes: Portrait, Landscape, Night & Portrait, Indoor, Candle, Self-Portrait, Sunset, Sport, Fireworks, Cuisine, Documents, Behind Glass, Auction.

Press the MENU button to bring up the Record mode Menu. You can use this shortcut menus to quickly change image resolution, reset all settings to factor defaults, adjust Exposure compensation, enable Silent mode as well as enter the Setup menu.

The Image Quality menu provides settings of SHQ (2816x2112), HQ (2816x2112 with greater compression), SQ1 (2048x1536) and SQ2 (640x480).

The Exposure Compensation menu provides seittings in the range of +2.0EV to -2.0EV in 1/3EV steps. The effect of the chosen setting is visible on the live image.

SETUP Menu Options

Memory Format - Format the xD memory card

Backup - Save a copy of images on to your PC

Menu Language - English, French, Espanol, Portuguese

Pixel Mapping - Map out bad pixels

Turn On with Camera or Playback button - Yes or No

Monitor Brightness - Adjust LCD backlight

Beep - Choose Low, High or Off

Camera sounds - Low, High or Off

Shutter Sound - Choose Shutter theme

Volume - Adjust sound volume during movie playback

Mic Icon - Record movies with (ON) or without (OFF) sound

Set Clock - Set time and or date

Video Out - Video out signal - NTSC or PAL format

Power Save - Yes - camera goes into sleep mode after 3 minutes of inactivity, and turns off after 15 minutes of inactivity; NO - no power saving

Press the 4-way selector "left" to enable Macro focus mode and take closeup shots at a range of 3.9 inches (0.1m) to infinity, or enable Super Macro mode and get as close as 2 inches (5cm.)

Movie mode lets you capture SHQ (640x480) or HQ (320x240) resolution motion video at 30fps with or without sound. The length of an SHQ movie is limited to 15 seconds, but HQ movie length is limited only by the amount of available memory. If sound recording is set ON in the SETUP menu, the optical zoom may not be used during recording. If sound recording is set OFF, the FE-180's optical zoom can be changed during recording. The microphone icon indicates that sound recording is ON.