Jim Lawler wrote
> the OM 2000 "wasn't even manufactured by Olympus at all. Instead it is a
> slightly patched design from and made by Cosina."
>
> Does this have any impact on the Oly faithful? And what is known about
> Cosina in general?
My first SLR was a Cosina, and after that experience I am
determined never to own another Cosina product, no matter whose
name is on the front and no matter what its actual merits might
be. This is a basic fact of brand names - once positioned, they
rarely move.
Most of the camera companies produce cheap (sometimes nasty)
bodies as a way of hooking beginners into the system. Canon has
done this best, by assuming the beginner is a moron. Olympus make
somewhat different assumptions and one hopes will hook a
different kind of beginner. While the OM-2000 is a plausible
beginner's body, it won't be long before some of the new OM users
run up against items currently missing from the system, such as
an ED/IF 300 f/4, 2.8 zooms and decent super FP flashes
(including a ring flash). At that point, if the stuff is still
missing, the disgruntled new users will all tell their friends
and it's downhill from there.
I haven't seen the lenses, but don't they take 52mm filters
rather than the standard 55mm? I would have preferred
to see the 35-70 f/3.5-4.5 brought back into production.
The bad reputation of the OM-4's for circuit failures has rubbed
off on other models, so it's a good thing for Olympus that the
OM-2000 hasn't turned out to be unreliable.
If, as has been said here, the glowing LED fogs film on long
exposures, surely it lowers contrast with a normal exposure?
Was it too much trouble to turn the LED off during exposure
the way Pentaxes did 20 years ago?
Dave Bulger wrote
> My take on it is that a body's job is to meter exposure and expose the film
> - - duties that just about all of the bodies and
> brands available today will do satisfactorily.
There speaks a man who has obviously never used a *really* crappy
body. Let me spell it out: a really bad body will make accurate
focussing impossible due to mirror, screen and/or film gate
misalignment, will chew up the film, will have confusing controls,
will lack a depth of field preview, will have a dim viewfinder even if
you live on carrots, will expose wrongly, will have sharp edges
that cut your fingers, will be heavy to carry, will smell funny,
will leak light, will show only 900f the image area, and will
otherwise make your life miserable. A modern crappy body adds
fiddly buttons, patronizing beeps and chirps, a propensity to
decide for itself what the picture should look like, knobs
that fall off, insane flashing displays, trapdoor modes, a
limited-life plastic mount, a voracious appetite for expensive and
hard-to-find batteries, a loud whining motor drive, a fixed matte
focussing screen, and a visual design done by Timothy Leary's
schizophrenic dog.
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