New Olympus Cameras with high ISO

Olympus has been busy this year with the announcement of seven different cameras.
They are as follows:

FE 210 – A 7.1 mega pixel, 3x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 640

FE230 – A 7.1 mega pixel, 3x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 1250

FE240 – A 7.1 mega pixel, 5x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 1000

FE250 – A 8 mega pixel, 3x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 3200 or 6400 and 10,000 in 3 mega pixel

u770SW - A 7.1 mega pixel 8 mega pixel, 3x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 1600

SP-550UZ - A 7.1 mega pixel, 18x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 5000

U760 – A 7.1megapixel, 3x optical zoom, 2.5 inch LCD screen and an ISO of up to 1600

Only two of these cameras sound interesting and they are the FE250 with a massive high ISO of 6400 and 10,000 in 3 mega pixel mode and the SP-550UZ with an 18x optical zoom and a high ISO of 5000.

It seems marketers are now using high ISO as another way of standing out in the crowd and compromising picture quality for higher and nosier sensitivity. It will be interesting to see if any of these high ISO settings are even usable or just predictability noisy. Even the top DSLR from Canon or Nikon do not claim to go that high.

What I would like to see is bigger sensors in cameras rather using pixel binning to increase the sensitivity as in the FE-250. Pixel binning does not increase the size of the actual photosites; it just combines the results of several photosites into a single pixel.



Digital Camera Source