Reply Hazy / Try Again

Last week I took a chance and bought another point and shoot… my 3rd in the past two years.. and hopefully the last one for the NEXT two years (at least). The last one took a nasty knock on a concrete slab and stopped working soon after… the damn thing was too hard to hold on to! I was happy enough with the results of the photos, but it was a very fiddly camera to grip and use if you had hands bigger than a Japanese teenage girl’s.

I’ve been researching new cameras like the Canon G9… but in the end, instead of the latest and greatest (which I can’t afford) I decided to go back to the past and bought a cheap used Olympus Camedia-5050z made way back in 2002. This camera had quite the devoted following and was even used by a lot of photojournlists who needed a powerful compact camera with a good lens. After playing with it for a few days, I can see why it was so beloved.

In many ways it’s STILL a much better p&s camera than most anything else currently on the market… for one thing… the lens is big and bright… an f/1.8… which I’ve never seen on a P&S camera before. And (while being portable) it’s big enough that I don’t feel like I’m going to drop it all the time. It’s made of metal and has a comforting heft. You could use it as a weapon in a pinch. It uses AA batteries and CF cards. It’s only 5 megapixels, but that’s the sweet spot for a p&s (as far as I’m concerned)… anything too much bigger takes photos that are too noisy for my liking. It starts up a bit slowly and the LCD screen isn’t as big or as bright as modern pocket cams… but that’s to be expected.

If you find a used one in good shape, I’d recommend picking it up.