I bought an Olympus FE-170(made in China) in Feb.2007 from GK Vale, Bangalore for a supposed to be discounted price of Rs:10,000/= with supposed to be "free" charger, four NiMH rechargeable batteries and one proprietary XD memory card of 512MB. It is lying unused/unusable eversince for the following reasons: 1) The designer's and manufacturer's dummies forgot to incorporate "type of battery" option. (Alkaline, NiMH, etc) in the software, motherboard design and in Settings. 2) The battery contact design at top and bottom of battery case is awfully defective. 3) The important provision of "Date Imprint" is not there. 4) Strange proprietary card continued when other manufacturers had moved to standard SD cards. The above are in addition to bad non-bright light performance and other flaws pointed out by author of above article and many other buyers. The manufacturer had obviously produced a huge number of this born-defective product and wanted to sell it off in time for release of his next model. The sellers probably received a fat commission for somehow exhausting the stocks and keeping their mouth shut about the defects. The "free" Hitachi charger(made in China) I got did not last more than an year. The "free" batteries were already more than two years old in storage. Not that other budget cameras are very great but this one is surely among the worst.

I get five or six shots from a new set of GOOD batteries!!
Much like other people!
Dont buy one!!

Graham lumb

This is a review about the Olympus FE-170, digital compact camera. It has 6mp resolution and that is enough for a compact. more MP only means more noise and noise is hard to remove.

this camera shines in bright light due to limited iso , but any how i am glad it doesn't handle high iso's for that i have my DSLR

What i like is the digital image stableliser and the power of pen;ight witch can be bought at almost any place in the world , and yes it can handle NIMH accu's batteries

it makes a great backup camera for holidays since in bright light conditions it realy does it job very well in low light you have to use a tripod or self timer

Overall it's an easy little camera to use and fits in a pocket quite well. Image quality is pretty good in good lighting conditions but degrades quickly in less than favourable lighting.

Like other Olympus digitals I've used it absolutely eats batteries and you had better carry a few spare batteries with you at all times if you don't want to get caught out. If they could sort this problem out their digital cameras would be approaching the quality of their film cameras!

Avoid the Olympus FE-170 at all costs! There are far, far better cameras out there - and they are a lot cheaper!
FE-170: An expensive load of rubbish!

The Olympus FE170 has a massive 6 Mega pixels and 3x optical zoom making it a good all rounder. As it records good film as well which is only limited by memory space. It is aimed at the beginners and those who want a fuss-free camera which is what attracted us to it. We must say that the image quality is also superb.