Digital Trends

GE E850

October 16th, 2007 | by David Elrich

Features and Design

The GE E850 is a feathery camera—a D-SLR it’s not—but it looks better than many of the silver-bodied digicams out there. The one tested had a black finish; the body is anodized, with polished aluminum, not totally plastic like other low-priced models. The camera is also available in red, blue, white and silver if you’d like to be a bit fashion conscious. The E850 has nice rounded edges and about the size of the proverbial Altoids tin it looks decent enough. It measures 3.9 x 2.37 x 1 (WHD, in inches) and weighs 5.46 ounces without battery.

The front has a clean look without many annoying logos and decals. The largest is the “5X” touting the zoom power which ranges from 28-140mm in 35mm terms. The lens pops out of the body when you power up and a built-in cover protects it when you shut down. Also on the front are the flash, tiny pinhole mic and an AF Assist lamp. This is in a weird spot—on the lower right-hand corner—so you better make sure your fingers don’t block it when framing your shots. Why companies make these boneheaded design moves escapes me.

On the top you’ll find the power and shutter buttons as well as a poorly designed rocker wide/tele zoom switch. This is one of worst I’ve ever used and it’s really hard to make slight adjustments. Take off another point. The edges are plain other than a DC-in jack and speaker on right side.

The rear is dominated by a 3-inch LCD rated a solid 230K pixels. Next to it are three small buttons for delete, menu and a smiley face for the obligatory Face Detection circuitry that’s 2007’s feature du jour for almost every point-and-shoot digicam. There’s also a main mode dial that easily switches between auto, playback, movie, stabilization mode (only digital not optical), access to a dozen scene modes, a separate setting for Portrait mode, panorama and manual. The specific Portrait mode gives you a good idea who the camera is for—aim-and-forget shooters who will be taking photos of friends and family. Manual options are really sparse. Basically you can change white balance, ISO (1600 maximum), shutter speed between 2-30 seconds, type of metering and exposure compensation. Forget anything like aperture and shutter priority modes. This is really a snapshooter’s camera. There nothing wrong with that as long as it does the job it’s supposed to handle. We’ll get to that in a bit.

The E850 has the typical four-way controller with center Function/OK button. The four points give access to exposure compensation, macro, flash modes and self timer settings. The menu system is very rudimentary and definitely needs to be polished for the next generation of cameras.

On the bottom is the battery/SD card compartment, plastic tripod mount and combo USB/AV out port.

The GE E850 comes with the basics including strap, battery/charger, USB and AV cables, nicely done Quick Start guide and 82-page User Manual as well as a software CD-ROM with ArcSoft PhotoImpression software for basic editing. After charging the battery and loading a card it was time to hit the streets.

Image Courtesy of GE