GE E840S review

General Electric (GE) makes everything from jet engines to theme parks, and now it makes digital cameras, too.

More accurately, the GE brand name has been licensed to a new company, General Imaging, which was set up in 2006 by a former president of Olympus Imaging Corporation. Newcomers to digital camera design often struggle to compete with the established leaders, but GE's pedigree shows promise.

So, too, does the design of the E840S. Its curved metal body is more stylish and feels sturdier than those of most £110 cameras. The 4x zoom lens and 2.7in, 230,400-pixel screen are great to see at this price, too. The Li-ion battery is welcome but its 241-shot life is disappointing, while shooting performance is fairly pedestrian. The layout of buttons and menus is straightforward and friendly, though, and casual users are unlikely to be kept waiting.

The E840S's face detection system sometimes struggled to spot faces, and when it did, it over-exposed them against dark backgrounds. Once you have pressed the shutter button, the camera waits until it identifies a beaming smile before it takes the picture. We first saw this feature on Sony's DSC-T2 and the lag of up to a second makes it more of a gimmick than a serious tool. Still, as gimmicks go, it's good fun. There's even blink detection, which warns you when the subject has blinked so you can take another shot. Panorama stitching is built in, too; we found that as long as the camera was horizontal, it worked superbly.

With such a comprehensive array of sophisticated features, it's disappointing that some of the core features haven't been thought through. It isn't possible to silence the beep that accompanies every button press without also muting the shutter release sound. Meanwhile, the shutter release sound is out of sync with the actual shutter, which can lead to mistakes.

More worrying are the issues that relate directly to image quality. When shooting in low light in fully automatic mode, the camera uses slow ISO and shutter speeds, resulting in blur. The Stabilisation mode boosts both settings to reduce the problem, but not by enough. This is particularly disappointing, as images were reasonably clean and detailed even at the maximum ISO 1600 setting. Automatic white balance wasn't great either, with photos taking on a strong yellow tint when shot under artificial light. Photos also tended to be a little soft, particularly towards the corners. None of these problems was fatal but they add up to slightly below-average quality for the price.

The E840S is by no means perfect, but its stylish design, fun features and low price are an attractive combination if image quality isn't a top priority.

Author: Ben Pitt