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2026-04-25 Olympus FE-20 Digital Camera

This Olympus FE-20 digital camera was hiding in a Value Village in the hardware/tools aisle. It was without a battery, a memory card and a price tag. I had already been down the stationary aisle where they used to display cameras. I had also checked the two shelves at right angles—the electronics/odd electrical items—that I had found cameras displayed recently. But finding an unpriced digital camera partially hidden under something was a new low.
    More and more lately in different Value Villages I have found discarded camera pouches with ridiculous pricing (e.g. $29.99) with nothing in them. Or oddly placed priced camera boxes containing accessory cords, instructions and even software program CDs that are missing the camera!
    I know the new policy is to take the item to the manager at the front of the store and get a price. When I approached the manager she said, “Where did you find that?” It might have been the direction I was approaching her, as the stationary area was behind her as I approached. I explained the problem—no price—and she said the first thing she had to check was if there was a priced box or carrying pouch in the area the camera should have been. She told me to wait and hurried off to see what she could find. 
    She returned quickly and I took her to the area I had found cameras before and pointed out the aisle further over I had found this camera. She quickly lost interest in the whole puzzle, confiding they have been having stuff walk out the door all day. She was getting a little upset about the losses, but I certainly wasn’t the problem.
    She asked if $2.99 would be a price I could live with and I said, “Sure.” So she printed a price sticker and we parted ways at the till.
    Anyway, back to the Olympus FE-20. It is an 8 megapixel camera from August of 2008. Its 3x f/3.1-5.9 zoom is equivalent to a 35 mm camera’s 36-108 mm zoom. It has a 4x digital zoom too. The lens is six elements in five groups with 4 aspherical surfaces. The shutter speeds go from 1 to 2000 sec. It can set its ISO level from 80-1000. The flash will reach 4 m on the zoom’s wide setting. It has a 2.5 inch screen.
    The lack of a battery was quickly solved—at least for capturing it with the lens extended—by using a FujiFilm camera battery. My family camera is an old FujiFilm Z10 that uses a small battery—the NP-45A—I find FujiFilm uses in a lot of their point and shoot cameras. Well it seems Olympus uses the same battery!
    The camera has over 10 Mg of internal memory, but then the question is how do you download the images when you are missing the USB cord? It so happens I do have some xD cards around, but not within reach.
 
Adapter(front)

Adapter(back)

I should point out the offer on the camera front “xD Picture Card / micro Sd” meant the camera came with a xD-to-micro SD adapter—not that the camera could just use either. This camera did not have that adapter in the xD slot. Again, I have that adapter somewhere, but do you really want to look at my sample photos?
    Evidentially the camera did pretty well taking images—certainly at its price-point of being pretty low if not the lowest in price camera of its day—except it was slow to come up when turned on and often pretty slow deciding to take the first picture, and the next… Some of that may be slow face recognition, deciding what ISO to set to minimize motion blur and/or choosing a Mode (it has a lot of modes). 
UpDate: I did dig out the MASD-1 adapter Olympus uses to allow microSD cards in xD memory card slots. I took a whole series of shots with the FujiFilm Z10 mentioned earlier and the Olympus FE-20. Upon downloading and examining the paired images I can honestly say the FE-20 does at least as well as the Z10. But I did find it definitely took time for the FE-20 to come on and to take and digest an image compared to the Z10.
Olympus FE-20 Image

FujiFilm Finepix Z10 Image

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