...on dpreview.com this morning.
This intrigues me for several reasons. Like a lot of people on this
List, I bought the old A1 as a "bridge" digital camera whilst waiting
for prices to come down on the E-1 (or, better yet, for the introduction
of the E-3, which I expected several years sooner than it actually
appears to be coming out, based on what the competitors were doing).
The A1 pleasantly surprised me with its capabilities, particularly its
Anti-Shake mechanism and its wireless flash capabilities along with the
ADI "smarts" for flash exposure. It's getting long in the tooth now,
but I was so impressed by its flash system that I went and bought both
macro attachments (ring and twin) as well as two high-powered autohead
flash units.
The A-700 will talk to all of this stuff, making it a great studio camera.
I'm slowly, painfully dragging myself away from the mental marriage of
body to lenses to accessories, and this is allowing me to see that I may
always end up being a "multi-system" kind of guy in the future. For
wide-angle and extreme wide-angle, I'll probably use Olympus bodies with
Olympus lenses; for extreme image quality (particularly in
astrophotography), a prosumer-or-better FF Canon body with legacy Oly
lenses mounted; and for studio/macro work, quite possibly the A-700.
I'm amazed (and disturbed) that it took me so long to arrive at this way
of thinking -- after decades of being a "one-system" guy, it's very hard
for me to start considering the bodies as the *least* important part of
the equation, to the point of total irrelevance compared to almost
everything else. And yet it makes sense, because the legacy stuff I own
can be leveraged in a variety of ways with the new bodies coming out,
particularly if I stop being emotionally attached to one marque.
It would be nice to think that one body from one maker could do it all,
yet it's obvious to me that this blessed state of affairs is far in the
distant future (if ever). And I've only got a limited number of years
left in me before the Grey Havens beckon.
Garth
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