I got a zuiko 50mm macro lens, which had as its selling points a) excellent macro capabilities while still being b) good for general purpose, e.g. portraits and c) relatively small. It's one of Olympus’ four-thirds system products, and I bought the E620 body to match. Though only a step up from entry level DSLR, it has a number of features new to me:
- basically instant-on
- much faster read times
- true manual macro focus
- image stabilization (ooh, man I love this)
- useful ISO above 100
- useable viewfinder
- many functions much faster to access, with one or two button presses
shot with Zuiko 50mm macro, e620 body
While retaining many features I liked in my point and shoot, notably
- articulated viewscreen
- relatively small size
A couple of things the old coolpix 8400 did better: architectural shots, frex. Oh and video, but I think I used that feature exactly twice in the almost exactly five years the 8400 was my main camera, so obviously not a big deal for me. It also had DC in, and that I think I will miss (though to be fair Olympus seems a bit more efficient of battery life.) And I just love the crispness and speed of this thing. To be perfectly frank, the big two (canon and nikon) are probably better choices for the average person, but Olympus evidently delivers a lot of customization even for their relatively low-end products (you can tune the camera not only to your lens profile, but a particular lens) and while it's not as good as open-sourcing the machine, still I appreciate that.
I really like both these shots, but I have a slight pref for this one. GQView morphed into geequee, and I haven't figured out, with the new program how to easily extract exif data—so no stats, sorry!
And yes, it does take better (and bigger) pics—frex, I didn't have to use the curve tool to lighten the tiger on today's etsy listing, which pretty much I do as a matter of course with the coolpix. Still trying to figure out color issues, though, it seems like the colors tend to be weak along the green/magenta axis vis a vis the amber blue, resulting in a lot of purple flowers coming out blue. However, that may simply be that the standard color curves are optimized for skin tones as opposed to flowers & foliage.
(Though I'm actually already learning to turn that to my advantage, and frankly I consider these pictures a sort of fantasy image—what I was seeing with my eyeballs wasn't nearly this cool.)
UPDATE, 10apr2021–added tags
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
