I don’t remember when it was, but a long time ago… Probably in mid 1999, I bought my first digital camera: an Olympus D-450. I wanted something that was small, light, flexible and cheap. The D-450 was that camera.

Over the following months, and through the summer 2000, after ironing out a lot of the lingering questions I had about what I needed from a camera, I researched what was available. I didn’t care about size or weight anymore: The thing was generally slung behind me or in a pack. I did care about optics.

Optics were really a defining quality for me. I had used a LOT of other people’s cameras, and time over time the ones I liked the least had poor lenses or poor lens configurations. It was the optics that made the camera, or, in other people’s speak it was the optics that “took good pictures”.

At the time, reading about the physics of lenses and a lot of optical variations, the Olympus glass aspherical lens was very highly held. Olympus, at the time, just released the C-2100UZ – a rough, heavy chassis with a 10x optical glass aspherical lens.

I bought one. Immediately, my love-hate relationship with the C-2100 started. It was much heavier than the D-450. It didn’t save my “preferences”, like the D-450. Its bulky frame prevented me from taking it some places I wanted to go.

But the pictures… Oh the pictures it took were divine. I could snag a picture of a heron that looked like I could touch it, where you could count the water drops on its feathers… Or of a moose, which other than overbright reflections, would have been a great series… Or of seventeen seals on a stormy rock quite a ways off the coast of Nova Scotia… Or of an immature bald ridiculously high in the trees… I could keep going, but I’m just delaying the inevitable.

So it’s been nearly 8 years with the C-2100. That, in and of itself, wouldn’t be enough to abandon by old faithful, but the power supply has been shredding through batteries like nuts – 4 fresh AA’s won’t even last 40 minutes anymore, and rechargeables get drained even faster.

So after months of contemplation, and weeks of researching, it’s probably unsurprising that my next camera – er, new camera – is also an Olympus. The SP-570 is a new, 20x optical system, with 11 groups of a total of 14 lenses, 4 of which are glass aspherical. Combined with pre-capture, face recognition, 10-shot panorama stitching, 13.5 FPS still-rate, blah blah blah. It’s amazing. This, combined with a $150 credit that Olympus was willing to give me for my C-2100 pretty much sealed the deal.

I looked pretty hard at Canon, and Nikon – both makers of fine cameras. I wanted to be impressed by someone other than Olympus. I really did. A number of people whom I respect have Canon Rebels or Nikons: They take some impressive pictures with them, too. But, as it has been before, the innovation – the real meaty difference between camera vendors – seems to be again with Olympus. It’s 3oz lighter with lens than the EOS XTi is without (a price-parity Canon model). A comparable zoom lens from Canon for the EOS series, is ~$600.

I’ve wasted away, photographically, for the last several years, and hope this dynamic package will get me out of that rut.

2 Comments

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  By Jenica, April 19, 2008 @ 1:14 pm

  So. Jealous.

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