Olympus VG-130 Features

The VG-130 has a 14 megapixel sensor and 5x optical zoom lens which is a 35mm equivalent of 26-130mm. The camera also has Digital Image Stabilisation to help take blur free photos.

As are commonly found on most Olympus compacts, the VG-130 has a range of magic filters, including: Punk, Pop Art, Pin Hole, Drawing, Fish Eye, Soft Focus and Sparkle. Other features include AF tracking, Intelligent Auto Mode (i-Auto), Shadow Adjustment Technology and Advanced Face Detection.

Movies are recorded in 720p HD with a dedicated button which starts shooting straight away.


 

Key Features

• 5x optical zoom lens (35mm equiv: 26-130mm)
• 720p HD movie recording
• 14 megapixel sensor
• 3.0 inch 230,000 dot colour LCD screen
• AF-Tracking
• Magic filters
• Digital Image Stabilisation
• Intelligent Auto Mode
• Advanced Face Detection
• Battery charging via USB-cable

Olympus VG-130 Handling

Rather impressively for a budget compact, the VG-130 has a full metal body and is a very small camera which will fit comfortably in your pocket. The buttons are all easy to press, with dedicated ones for movie recording and the zoom control on the back of the camera rather than around the shutter button.

If you've used an Olympus compact recently, you'll be familiar with their menu layout. As soon as you switch the camera on you can switch between the shooting menus by cycling left or right. When you are in your desired mode you can changed the settings available in that mode by pressing up or down. The menus are easy to use and well labelled, although if you move round the menus too quickly the camera can take a second to catch up on occasions.

The camera is ready to take pictures within a couple of seconds of switching on and is quick to focus. Although there is no CIPA rating provided for the battery, during testing it was capable of around 220 shots. There are three continuous shooting modes available, sequential (full resolution), high-speed 1 (3 megapixel) and high-speed 2 (3 megapixel), capable of 0.8 fps, 2.3 fps and 10 fps respectively.


 

Olympus VG-130 Performance

When viewing the wide-angle image at full size there is plenty of purple fringing in the trees but the images do have an impressive amount of detail given that we are looking at a budget digital compact, which is also true for images taken using the lens at its longest length. The VG-130 takes well exposed images with good colour reproduction. Despite a minimum focusing distance of 7cm it is possible to get close enough to take a pleasing, well detailed, macro picture.