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The Olympus FE-340 joins the growing trend of more personable digital camera designs. You can choose between eye-catching colors like pink, navy, or red, or stick with silver or black bodies. Whatever color you choose, the Olympus FE-340 has a super-thin body style that easily fits most pockets and small purses. With a retractable lens that withdraws fully into the camera body, the FE-340's front panel has no major protrusions when the lens is stowed. Weighing in at 4.6 ounces (132 grams) with the battery, and measuring 3.8 x 2.3 x 0.7 inches (97 x 58 x 18 millimeters), the FE-340 is compact and light weight, perfect for travel.

With its 8.0-megapixel CCD, 5x optical zoom lens, and 2.7-inch color LCD display, the Olympus FE-340 offers a lot for its low price. Novice users will appreciate the available in-camera shooting guides for stepping up their knowledge, while more advanced users will like the in-camera editing tools and expanded shooting options. With 15 preset Scene modes, Face Detection, Smile Shot, and Digital Image Stabilization settings, the Olympus FE-340 can handle just about any situation.

Look and feel. Despite its rather thin body, the Olympus FE-340 was fairly comfortable in my medium-sized hand. Shooting one-handed wasn't too awkward, as the Shutter button, Mode dial and Zoom lever were within easy reach.

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However, delving into the LCD menu system or making other mode changes (such as accessing EV compensation) were definitely easier with a two-handed grip. The camera's small size leaves no space for a true handgrip, but there is a small, thin raised finger rest on the front panel, and the edge of the slightly raised LCD display area makes a good thumb rest.

Camera controls are minimal, consisting of only a few buttons sprinkled on the rear and top panels. Options like exposure compensation, macro mode, flash mode, and the self-timer can all be accessed via control buttons, while more advanced features like white balance and ISO require the menu system.

A large, bright, 2.7-inch color LCD monitor leaves just enough space on the rear panel for a small cluster of controls. Though its surface is highly reflective (which also means easily smudged), the Olympus FE-340's LCD is fairly bright outdoors. You can boost the LCD brightness via the LCD Brightness / Erase button on the rear panel when needed. The Olympus FE-340 also offers a Gridline display mode, which divides the image into thirds, horizontally and vertically, to help you line up shots, accessed through the Display button.

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Lens. The Olympus FE-340 offers a 5x optical zoom lens, equivalent to a 36-180mm zoom on a 35mm camera, a generous zoom range compared to other consumer digital cameras in this class.

In addition to the 5x optical zoom, the Olympus FE-340 offers as much as 4x digital zoom. We like to remind readers that digital zoom often results in lower resolution and detail, because the camera is simply cropping the center of the frame and enlarging it.

Function. The Function menu sets commonly-changed items.

Menu. The Main menu the remaining settings.

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Interface. In Program AE mode, half-pressing the Shutter button displays the camera's selected aperture and shutter speed settings in the LCD display. So while you can't directly control the exposure, you can at least see what the camera deems is appropriate, and either adjust the EV compensation or enable the flash.

The Olympus FE-340's menu system is fairly straightforward. A short-cut menu screen appears at the first press of the Menu button, offering quick links to commonly-used features, or you can skip through to the main Camera Menu, which is a fairly standard tabbed interface. There's also a shorter Function menu for more commonly-used settings like white balance and resolution.

With 15 preset Scene modes, Auto and Program AE exposure modes, and a nice selection of exposure tools such as ISO, white balance, EV compensation and metering options, the Olympus FE-340 can handle a variety of shooting conditions. Accessing all of these modes and options is fairly uncomplicated, as the Olympus FE-340's external controls were easy to identify and the LCD menu system logically laid out. The Mode dial on the rear panel controls the main exposure mode, and there are only a few external controls available for parameters like zoom, flash mode, EV compensation, macro mode, and the self-timer setting. All other changes are made either through the main Record menu or through the Function menu, the latter of which is accessed by pressing the OK/Function button in the center of the Multi-controller.

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The Olympus FE-340's main menu is laid out similarly to other Olympus digital cameras, with an initial shortcut screen directing you either to the main Camera menu, or to Setup, Silent Mode, Image Quality, Scene, or Reset options. Once in the main Camera menu, selections are displayed in a tabbed interface, and you simply use the up and down arrow keys to scroll. Exposure options such as white balance, ISO, resolution, and quality are available through the Function menu, which overlays the image display area in the LCD monitor. The FE-340 features what Olympus titles Perfect Shot Preview mode, which essentially displays smaller thumbnails of the image composition with varying levels of adjustment applied. For example, when you access the EV compensation adjustment, four smaller thumbnails appear, demonstrating the effect of each step of EV compensation. Thus, you can quickly choose the best image. When setting the white balance (accessed through the main Camera menu), the image display adjusts as you scroll through the available options, giving you an idea of the final outcome.
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