What I Got For Christmas Part 18 – An Olympus e-510

This was the item I wanted more than any other item on my list:

Actually, what I had put on my list was a dSLR camera (preferably Nikon or Canon) and of course, being me, I had given them a few models that I thought might work well. My wonderful parents had gone camera hunting and were price shopping more or less. Of the places they had gone, they were pretty sure that they were going to go the route of Nikon because I had asked to make it at least someone compatible with my dad’s real SLR camera.

In any case, they happened to make their way over to National Camera Exchange where they asked the guy which camera he would get… And he told them neither and recommended this one instead. At first they hestitated, but then the guy did something with all 3 camera’s. It had been snowing I guess, and he took the zooms on each camera and put them on maximum and pointed it at a snowflake on a window on the opposite side of the room. With no tripod he proceeded to take a picture with each of the 3 cameras.

All three had absolutely no problem zooming in that far (a function of the lense), nor did they have a problem focusing. Where the olympus won though was it’s image stabilizer. It seems that the canon and the nikon both were unable to stablize the image enough to prevent motion blur at that high a magnification level. So my parents, being the smart people they are, listened to the guy at National Camera Exchange, and got that camera for me.

At first I hestitated and though I should take it back to get one of the two that I had heard so much about. But after playing with it for a month now, I am very satisfied. Here’s what I like and what I dislike:

• I love the the battery life. I had no problem taking close to 700 pictures with flash on one charge. I could probably go higher if i did it all at once, but still, thats about 500 more than my last consumer level camera.
• I love the settings – I’m sure I would be able to do this on any dSLR camera.
• I love the quality – I have no complaints with this things ability to take pictures. In fact, you’ve already seen some of them… Including the ones of me and Amber making the ’08 in flames on new years.
• I dislike the fact it has no A/C adapter. This isn’t a big deal for me, but if I ever wanted to do computer controlled time-lapse photography, I would be out of luck because the camera had no ability to be plugged into the wall (at least not that I can find).
• I dislike the memory card (this is stupid, but I dislike the memory card because it now completes my ability to have all 3 major memory card standards… Why couldn’t they all just use one memory card eh?)
• I love the flash recharge rate… I can take about a picture a second with flash… maybe faster.
• I love the fact it’s a 4/3’s lense system… Although it’s not overly used, I hope it really does become the industry standard like it’s supposed to be.
• I love using a viewfinder again and finding that I can take better pictures with it than I can with the LCD screen.
• I love the fact it has so many settings that I am able to find a way to make even the simplest picture in the world to shoot, look bad :-). And make the hardest picture in the world to shoot look good :-).

You can probably guess what will be at the top of my list next year: Lenses ;-).

In fact, once I’m married and hopefully have a little bit more money to throw around (it seems a lot of money at the moment is going towards the upcoming wedding), and will be able to pick up two lenses I really want… Namely:

• 50mm F2.0 Macro Lense – http://www.olympus-esystem.com/dea/products/lens/50_20M/
• 8mm F3.5 Fisheye – http://www.olympus-esystem.com/dea/products/lens/8_35F/

Hmmm, maybe I can sneak them onto my wedding registry somehow ;-).