On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 10:13, Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Would anyone have bought an OM-5? Probably not many users of
OM-3/4Ti's would have (I doubt much improvement could have been
realized), perhaps users of OM-1/2's would have upgraded. No doubt
Olympus would have lost money on the deal, but we'll never know now.
Tris
It does seem to me that Oly did miss out on the sales potential of
periodic detail improvements and restyling every couple of years that
gets reviews in the magazines and gives the impression of continuing
development.
The lesson to be learned from this is "Never design a product so perfect
that it cannot be improved upon." The OM series from the OM-1 to the
OM-4 are so good that it simply leaves no room for improvement or minor
refinements. So Olympus painted themselves into a corner. The other
manufacturers like N*k*n and C*n*n build products with designed-in flaws
so the customer will keep coming back for the next incremental improvement.
This lesson is not lost on one BIG company in the computer software
business up in Washington.
That is loyal, but many would not agree that the OMs are perfect.
Great for when they came out, but... There are lots of things that
could be improved upon in my OM4T without changing its basic nature
such as higher flash synch speed, trailing shutter curtain synch,
aperture display in the viewfinder, more durable finish that did not
make the camera look cheap after 6 months of heavy use, mirror lock
up, mechanical shutter operation in manual at all speeds like the
FM3a, ability to cancel the self timer without firing the shutter,
further refine the shutter so that OM2 people could only claim
superiority to early OM4s, make the shutter speed ring on the OM4
work as smoothly as the one on my OM1, redesign that dorky little
metal thingy on the self timer into something that could be operated
with gloves and does not look like a Rube Goldberg device, true
double exposure capability, a much more obvious indicator in the
viewfinder that the exposure compensation is engaged, further
improvements in a flash system that would make it easy to accurately
do flash fill by just dialing in the difference you want. How about
redesign of the front ring on the lenses with a groove on the outside
that will take a squeeze button bayonet hood that goes on and off
instantly with a retrofit available for older lenses? If Oly could do
special point and shoots like the OM Product, you would think by the
time a body cost over a thousand dollars they could have produced a
series of deluxe finishes ala Leica with special leathers etc that
would have sold a few. And what about that winder looking like it
was designed for a cheap plastic camera? Or the F280 flash designed
to be used by the pro OM4T or the consumer OM77 which means hauling
around the infra red system for another camera.
None of these things are absolutely necessary but the point I was
making was that Olympus did nothing to keep the OM camera as an
ongoing enterprise in front of the media that talks to potential
customers. So month after month and year after year Oly competitors
got review after review and there was no reason to look at Oly again
because it had not changed since the last review 10 years ago. My
goodness, we have all read reviews that went on and on over the
change in the shape of the wind lever of some other camera. So
instead of being thought of as a modern special purpose professional
camera it came to be thought of as just an old outdated camera that
Oly was just trying to get its tooling costs out of.
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California
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