You have summed up the nature of the dilemma pretty well Skip. To see so much
OM gear hitting the streets so soon after reading
that glowing review in AP certainly made me stop and think. John Duggan has
already quoted the conclusion of the AP review, but it
was the following passage that made me stop in my tracks:
"With so many 'firsts' and such bold claims about the camera, there was a
general feeling that the camera would be, at best, a 'good
first attempt' at a digital SLR, with room for future improvements. How wrong
we cynics were. While it is fair to say that there
are areas that could be honed, the overall performance of the E-1 is sublime."
Sure, as Chris has noted, the E-1 will be obsolete in a couple of years
(probably much sooner). In the same way that the OM-1 is
long obsolete - and we still use them to take photos don't we? So is this
really the time to switch, following the lead of Skip and
Tom, to a digital SLR which seems to have the same user-friendly philosophy as
the OM?
As they both know, I decided otherwise, but not for want of admiration for what
Olympus have produced (and will doubtless go on to
improve in just the way they did with the OM line). No, what decided me was
the media side of the equation. I have just been
looking at Kodachromes dating from the late 1960s (taken with an Instamatic 100
- sorry for the OT). I don't have any confidence
that I could do the same thirty years hence with digital images, because the
likelihood of being able to 'read' the data is, I
believe, low. Either the media will have degraded, or the hardware to read
them will also be long obsolete. Or the data archiving
and retrieval task will be too much of a chore.
But I very nearly faltered!
--
Piers
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Skip Williams
> Sent: 11 November 2003 03:57
> To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [OM] What's left - OM stuff FS
>
>
--snip
>
> I just read the new Amatuer Photographer (U.K. magazine)
> review of the E-1 and they really loved the camera, gave it a
> 95%. They couldn't say enought good things about the camera
> and said that it produced the best images this side of a
> Canon 1Ds. They particularly mentioned the less aggressive
> approach that Olympus seems to have taken regarding in-camera
> processing. This jives with continued postings over on
> dpreview.com where many shooters have been talking about the
> "film-like" characteristics of the images.
>
> I hear it calling.....calling........but not until 2004
>
--snip
>
> Skip
>
>
--snip
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