# Olympus vs. Canon



## SirKenin (Dec 27, 2007)

Olympus FE-300 12.0 Megapixel digital camera 

Canon SD1000 7.1 Megapixel Digital ELPH.

I bought the Olympus first, as the price was amazing for a 12 MP camera.  I figured out very quickly why.  Not only does it take XD cards, which no other camera uses except a couple of Fujis, it takes forever to take a picture and the picture quality is CRAP.  There is so much noise in an indoor picture that it's intolerable.  I was horribly disappointed.  The picture was so grainy and the color was so crappy..  Even the focus was terrible.  The only part of the picture in focus was the center of the picture.  Everything else was almost blurry.

Terrible, terrible camera.

I took it back this evening and exchanged it for the Canon.  The difference between them is night and day.  The picture quality on the Canon is excellent.  The colors are very believable.  They are not grainy and the whole subject is in focus.  The face tracking technology works extremely well.  Even with digital zoom, which in the past was a tricky business, the picture turns out perfectly.

The camera powers on instantly, it takes seconds to take and save a picture, it uses SD, it comes with a 32 MB SD card (although I purchased 2 x 2 GB cards for $25 for the pair on sale).  A slight jitter in your hand doesn't render the picture all blurry.  

For a value camera it's perfect.  It's not packed with features or anything, but it has all the features I need.  I highly recommend it for the casual photographer.


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## The_Other_One (Dec 27, 2007)

Olympus cameras are junk.  I've seen very few Olympus cameras I'd even consider purchasing.  And you learned the most valuable lesson; megapixles aren't everything   My 5MP Panasonic can keep up with some 6-7MP cameras.  And my new Nikon...well that's a SLR so it's kind of in a league of it's own ^^;


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## SirKenin (Dec 27, 2007)

hehe. True, true. I have an aging Canon S30 camera. I've kicked the crap out of this thing. Dropped it. Spilled things on it. Kicked it around in my laptop bag. And it STILL takes awesome pictures...usually. It's starting to give out and some pictures come out blurry. However, it's an old unit, I paid $740 for it, it's a 3 MP camera, and it STILL kicks the crap out of the Olympus, hands down. It has tons of features, amazing color and clarity. I'll probably keep it around as a backup.

So yeah, you're right. MP aren't everything. Optics make all the difference in the world.


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## Ramodkk (Dec 28, 2007)

So the Canon SD1000 is a good camera? Becuase I want to get a camera and was looking at this one which I rally liked:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16830120147

I'm just the ocassional camera man...


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## SirKenin (Jan 1, 2008)

Yeah, I'm quite happy with it.  I'm still getting used to it, but so far so good.


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## a123 (Jan 2, 2008)

i was thinking that the image stabilizer feature would be good on the olympus?  ever tested that out?


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## SirKenin (Jan 2, 2008)

No, simply because it wouldn't matter how good the image stabilization is if the image was so noisy that you couldn't use it, and everything was out of focus except the center of the picture.


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