Olympus E-410

Wow, not a Canon, not from the 1980s, and a digital camera!

I lifted this photo from ephotozine.com since I don't actually own this camera, but I did have the opportunity to use one awhile ago and enjoyed quite a bit really.

It's a fun little camera to use; so tiny, it feels a lot like using the Konica FT-1 Motor that I wrote about the other day. That little kit lens is sharp sharp sharp, no two ways about it; a great value compared to most other kit lenses you'll find these days. And honestly, despite what you'll hear, noise isn't as big of a deal as you might have heard on these Olympus cameras; yes, there's more than you'll find on most of the wonderful cameras currently on the market today, but if you've got a photo that doesn't succeed because of noise, it probably wasn't that successful of a photo to begin with.

So what don't I like about it? Few fixed focal length lenses. Not a big deal from an image quality standpoint; the new Oly zooms are fantastic and fairly fast aperture.  But the E-410's such a small camera, it would be great to have some ultra compact pancake-style fixed focal length lenses to go with it (like some of Pentax's Limited lenses).

I'm also not sold on the whole 4:3rds thing. When they first started out with 4:3rds they said it'd be better from the standpoint of cropping, but in this day and age I don't feel that I need to be bound to the old standard 4:3rd-ish print ratio, and I happen to prefer the more common, and wider, 2:3rd ratio that you find on most other DSLRs. Actually, I'd love to have an SLR with a 16:9 ratio...well maybe, maybe not.  Of course, as Olympus was quick to point out, 4:3rds fit computer screens and TVs much better, so way to be forward thinking Olympus and catch on to the fact that digital display was the way of the future, too bad you didn't think forward enough to realize that 16:9 was the new standard.

So okay, to sum it up. Great camera, great lenses, great image quality, but not really what I look for in a camera.  With today's ILC cameras eating up the market for large sensor compact cameras, I think it'd be safe to say that the E-410 and it's successors were the only 4:3rds bodies to really, and I mean REALLY, deliver on the promise of smaller sensors allowing for smaller bodies.

Example:

Shot at ISO 800 with the Zuiko Digital 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6