Software (Olympus wins) – If you’re shopping for a $109 camera, chances are good that you aren’t planning on purchasing Adobe Photoshop. Most personal computers come with some sort of rudimentary photo editing program, and most digital cameras come packaged with a simple software suite. Indeed, the Olympus FE-25 and Nikon Coolpix L19 come with token software programs that are compatible with Windows and Mac computers. Nikon’s Software Suite for Coolpix comes with QuickTime for watching movies and Panorama Maker to stitch images together. It also comes with Nikon Transfer software that allows you more options than most transfer protocols; it isn’t required to download images from the camera, but it does let you embed data like copyright info, save images to two locations as a backup, and transfer images directly to Nikon’s myPicturetown photo sharing web site. There are no editing options available with the Nikon software, which is unfortunate as most other manufacturers provide at least a few tasks like resizing and cropping. When the software installs, you can click a button to download a free trial of Nikon software off the internet. But, of course, that will cost you a few extra dollars.

The Olympus Master 2 software that is included with the camera is free and complete. The Olympus version can resize, crop, insert text, adjust brightness/ contrast, color balance, tone curve, gamma, auto tone correction, hue/saturation, monochrome/ sepia, sharpness/ blur, distortion correction, and red-eye correction. Because the FE-25 produces plenty of red eyes, that last editing feature may need to be used often. I tried out the easy “one click” red-eye correction and it only partially worked. It blackened the eyes that I clicked on, but left a red ring around the edges – still scary looking. The only perk of Nikon’s software suite was the panorama stitching, but that is also included in the Olympus Master software. All in all, the Olympus software offers many more editing options and is just as easy to use.