What counts as a fossil?

Ten years is my cutoff line for "fossilization" for electronica.

With the march of time, that means that cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mark II qualify. It was introduced at the end of 2008, just in time for Christmas shopping, and discontinued in December of 2012.

Still, though, it feels weird to call a 21MP DSLR that's capable of shooting HD video a "fossil".

Time marches on. The Sony Mavica was a wonder in its day, too.

Taken with an EOS 5D Mark II

E-300 update...

Just needing to gather up some more photos with the Olympus E-300 EVOLT to illustrate the second half of the review.

Here's a loaded baked potato shot in indirect sunlight at base ISO of 100 and a pistol shot on a heavily overcast morning at the max ISO of 400. (Well, maximum unexpanded ISO. But it's noisy enough without faking ISO 800 or 1600.)

Both were taken using the Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, more about which in the closing part of the review.

Old Enough to Vote

Had the Nikon D1X out to keep the shutter exercised yesterday. With a 21-y.o. camera, you don't take that for granted. Sooner or later it will snap its last photo...but that day wasn't yesterday!

The staff at Fat Dan's is friendly!

The problem with the D1X for indoor work by available light is my paucity of Nikon DX lenses. The best DX lens I have for the purpose is the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR, but the D1X is too old to control the electronic diaphragm on that lens. There's the 17-55mm f/2.8G, but it's not stabilized and it's a bazooka of a lens; very unsubtle.

I went with the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G, which is also not stabilized, but at least is compact and light. The 18-70 was originally a kit lens for the then-new D70 in 2004. The lens was discontinued in the early 'teens, but is a hidden gem in the Nikon DX lineup. Inexpensive and tack sharp, even dudes like Thom Hogan speak well of it.

With an old camera like the D1X, your maximum realistically usable ISO is 800, and even that's pushing it, as you can see by the noise in the portrait I shot.

It's hand-held, 1/125th of a second at f/4 at a focal length of 34mm in aperture priority mode with the lens cranked as wide open as it would get.

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Digital Fossils

In a Telegram conversation, I remarked that the 7" Kindle Fire tablets that Amazon is selling for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's would have been props on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Marko replied "If the Fire had existed when TNG was still running, it would have been the most powerful computing device on the planet by a fair margin. Weird to think about."

He's not wrong, either.

I remember back in the days of dialup and BBSes, call it 1990 or so, one of the rotating sig lines in my SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader) file was "And you may tell yourself 'This is not my one gig drive'."

My boyfriend at the time had a 386DX 33 with an HDD that was so huge that it had to be partitioned into virtual drives. Like eighty whole megabites or something like that!

Coincidentally, the SD card slot on my computer right now is occupied by a 64GB card from an old Nikon D7100. Each 24 megapixel RAW image file takes up over 30MB. 

My wristwatch has higher screen resolution than a Sega Genesis.

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Olympus E-300 Review: Part 1

Olympus launched their first DSLR, the E-1, to much fanfare in 2003. Not only was it the first DSLR from Olympus, it was the first interchangeable lens system camera designed from the ground up for a digital sensor, rather than being adapted from a film camera.

Unlike Canon and Nikon, Olympus didn’t have a huge installed user base of autofocus lens owners they had to lure to digital, so they started with a clean sheet of paper for their sensor and lens mount.

As part of the Four Thirds consortium, along with Kodak, Panasonic, and Fuji, they used a smaller sensor, which would be less expensive, an important factor in those days when image sensors were still phenomenally spendy. The E-1 had a ruggedized, weather-sealed magnesium alloy body, an innovative ultrasonic vibrating sensor cleaning mechanism, and resolution equivalent to or better than the contemporary Canon EOS-1D and Nikon D1X despite only costing $1699 (about 2800 bucks in 2023 dollars).

Almost simultaneous with the launch of the Olympus E-1 came the next shot fired in the DSLR wars, from Canon, who announced a stripped down consumer DSLR with a plastic body shell for under a grand. The 6.3MP EOS 300D, sold in the US as the Digital Rebel, hit shelves for $999 with a bundled 18-55mm kit lens. Olympus returned fire in 2004 with their second DSLR, a consumer-grade 8MP camera named the E-300, which sold for $999 with a Zuiko 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens included in the box.

The E-300 had three selectable autofocus points, had an ISO range of 100-400 (expandable to 800 or 1600, but don't bother), shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, and could shoot 2.5 frames/sec...at least for four frames, at which point the buffer was filled.

Despite the lack of a viewfinder hump (due to its odd Porro finder system) and small Four Thirds sensor, the E-300 wasn't meaningfully smaller than its competition from Canon, although it offered more megapixels for less money.

Part two of this review will have some photo results and conclusions!

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Portrait Photos With the Olympus E-510

Olympus's DSLR cameras have been discontinued for more than a decade now, but that doesn't mean they can't still snap a decent picture.

The E-510 was their midrange offering from 2007 that introduced the Panasonic-designed MOS sensor to the Oly DSLR lineup, replacing the Kodak-manufactured CCD sensor used by the earlier cameras. 

Its predecessors had already introduced dust reduction and live view to the DSLR market, and to those features the 10-megapixel E-510 added in-body image stabilization, previously a Pentax exclusive.

I've been out shooting with my E-510 lately, using the excellent Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4.0 zoom lens, which has a field of view equivalent to the classic 24-120mm focal length zoom lens on a full-frame sensor.

Here are a couple of casual portraits snapped with this setup at my neighborhood hangout, Fat Dan's Chicago Style Deli...