Big Little Camera: The Olympus E-3

Olympus was unique among the big camera makers in that they had not pursued autofocus technology in their interchangeable lens single lens reflex cameras, and therefore when they designed their first digital SLR they were essentially starting from a clean sheet of paper.

Since they didn't have to accommodate an existing lens mount and its associated library of glass, they were free to use a physically smaller sensor, working with Eastman Kodak to create the Four Thirds System.

This allowed for small cameras and small lenses and this was hyped for their early consumer and enthusiast DSLRs, but which probably came back to bite them in the butt when the E-3 was launched in late 2007 because the E-3 is not a small camera.

The thing is, the E-3 wasn't intended to be small and light. It was intended to be a professional camera and the cues are everywhere, in features that you'd normally only find on its Nikon D3 or Canon EOS-1D Mark III contemporaries.

The body was magnesium alloy, rugged and weather sealed. Rather than a mode dial, you cycle through your PASM by holding a button and spinning a control wheel. The battery and memory card doors are secured by positive latches. There's a built-in mechanical shutter to cut off light from the eyepiece for long exposure low-light photography. About the only distinctively "pro" feature it lacked was the built-in vertical grip. Also, thanks to the smaller 10MP Live MOS Four Thirds sensor, it lacked the $4-5,000 price tag of its APS-H and Full Frame competitors, boasting an MSRP of only $1,699 at launch.

It had an articulated 2.5" LCD screen, unlike the competition because, also unlike the competition it could shoot in live view. It sported Olympus's IS in-body image stabilization, a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000th, and could shoot in burst mode at 5 frames per second.

Alas, despite the fact that equivalent lenses were much smaller than its larger-sensored competition, the idea of a pro Four Thirds DSLR just never really caught on.

A shame, because Zuiko glass is great and this thing takes nice pictures...

DSLR Pics: Puppers with the Olympus E-3

The Zuiko Digital ED 12–60mm 1:2.8–4 SWD was the kit lens originally packaged with the Olympus E-3 when it was new. With its 24-120mm equivalent focal length range and fast aperture, it's a good piece of glass and compact compared to equivalent APS-C and full-frame lenses.

Digicam Pics: Neighborhood photos with the Samsung TL500

The Schneider-Kreuznach glass in the little Samsung TL500 has a maximum aperture of f/1.8, which is pretty dang fast for a little pocket camera with a 3x (24-70mm equivalent) zoom lens.

DSLR Pics: Fair Folk with the Sony a700

My seventh day at the Indiana State Fair I brought the Sony a700. Of the three lenses I have available I decided to take the Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T*, which is a nice high-quality general purpose zoom. 

It's not an ideal choice for me at the fair, as the 120mm equivalent maximum focal length is a little shorter than I prefer for those environs, but the 18-200 superzoom I have is too slow to focus and has too slow a maximum aperture at longer focal lengths for me to be entirely happy with it on the old Sony sensor. I was too afraid that I'd have to crank the ISO up past 1000 to get any good shots from the blacksmithing shed or in the Pioneer Village mercantile building.

I was pretty happy with the results. This lens focuses reasonably quickly and quietly and delivers pleasing images.

Maxxum Overdrive: The Sony a700

When Sony acquired Konica Minolta's camera business in 2006, the successor for the Maxxum 7D was already on the drawing board. It wound up being the second Sony-branded DSLR, since the Maxxum 5D successor had already been ready to launch and was simply re-badged as a Sony.

Whereas Konica Minolta had marketed their high-tech autofocus SLRs as "Maxxum" in the USA, "Dynax" in Europe, and "𝛼" (Alpha) in the home market, Sony went with the 𝛼 nomenclature everywhere. The Maxxum 5D replacement became the 𝛼100, while the new high-end camera was marketed as the 𝛼700. (Because I am too lazy to set up a macro, I'm just going to use a lower-case Latin "a" rather than the Greek "𝛼" from here on out.)

Unlike the earlier a100, which used an APS-C sized 10MP CCD sensor, the a700 sported an all-new 12MP Sony Exmor CMOS sensor backed by the latest version of Sony's Bionz image processor. 

Sony had a lot of experience in cameras already, both via their own popular Mavica and Cyber-shot lines of digital point-and-shoots, as well as being a major supplier of sensor chips to other makers. Additionally, they acquired a raft of tech from Konica Minolta.

The sensor featured Minolta's Anti-Shake in-body image stabilization, renamed "Super Steady-Shot" by Sony. It also inherited Minolta's Eye Start, which put a couple sensors under the eyepiece that would wake the camera and start focusing (depending on the setting) when raised to the photographer's eye. The a700 added a sensor in the front of the grip to ensure that the Eye Start sensors wouldn't mistake a tee shirt for a face when the camera was hanging on a strap.

The mode dial had the usual full-auto green rectangle, typical PASM settings, the user-configurable MR (for "Memory Recall"), and then the easy-mode Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports, etc. for novices.

Said novices would need to be fairly well-heeled, as the a700 sported an MSRP of $1400 (almost $2200 in current dollars), but gave you a bright pentaprism viewfinder and magnesium front and top body panels for your money.

Oddly, for such a gizmo-laden camera in this price range, there was no LCD status display up top. Instead, when powering up, the 3.0" rear LCD screen would display all the camera's current settings.

The rear panel was high-impact plastic and featured a 3" TFT display, as well as a joystick for moving sensor points and navigating menus and a sliding switch for enabling or defeating the Super Steady Shot picture.

Currently used bodies are running as low as under a c-note and the lenses can be had for a song, as the Alpha mount is essentially orphaned with Sony having discontinued their DSLR offerings.

It gives splendid results for a digital body nearing two decades old.

Down the K-hole: Pentax K20D

The K20D was Pentax's second generation of semi-pro DSLR, replacing the K10D in January of 2008.

While its $1,300 MSRP put it head to head with Canon's EOS 40D, the price leader in the category, its Samsung-sourced 14.6 megapixel CMOS sensor offered almost half again the resolution, making it the highest-resolution APS-C camera on the market at the time (tied, of course, with its Samsung-badged clone, the GX-20.)

It was Pentax's top-of-the-line DSLR, but the line in question only consisted of the K20D and the cheaper, lower-resolution K200D.

The mode dial has the usual full-auto (green rectangle) and PASM modes, along with a couple unique-to-Pentax settings. The "TAv" position is "Shutter and Aperture Priority", where the user operates the front and rear dials to manually select the shutter speed and aperture size and the camera automatically adjusts the ISO to try and get the best exposure. "Sv" is "Sensitivity Priority" and functions like Program mode except the rear dial is used to set ISO on the fly, which is useful when operating in an environment where lighting conditions might vary wildly.

It's a physically small camera in the category; noticeably smaller than the Canon, Nikon, and Olympus entries and even slightly svelter than the Sony a700.

It's missing some typical buttons, such as ISO, instead using a combination of the "Fn" button and on-screen menus to select these settings.

The battery and memory card doors are securely latched and the whole camera feels quite rugged. With its 14.6MP sensor and an ISO range from 100 to 3200 (expandable to 6400), the K20D still holds up quite well today and nice used ones can be found for well under two hundo.

This is the first Pentax DSLR I've spent any real time with, and I can see why Pentax fans are so loyal. It's a solid, easy to use camera that's nice and compact.

Semi-Tough: Canon EOS 40D

Of the high-end “prosumer” DSLR bodies that hit the market during 2007-2008, the Canon EOS 40D had the most aggressive pricing…by a whole dollar.

When it was released in late August of '07, Canon had yet to slice the DSLR market as finely as they did in later years. There were the 1D and 5D professional cameras, but lower on the totem pole there was only the plastic-bodied entry-level EOS Rebel XTi, and the 40D, successor to the earlier 30D.

This meant that the $1,299 Canon EOS 40D had to cater to every buyer from well-heeled novices who were too cool for a Rebel to advanced amateurs and professionals who couldn't justify the $3,000+ tariff demanded for the full-frame 5D.

This made for a mode dial that was a little... crowded.

You had your "Green Rectangle" setting, which turned the camera into a fully-automated giant point-'n'-shoot. For the advanced amateur or pro, there was your regular array of "PASM" modes (as well as "A-DEP", which adjusted the aperture to ensure that all subjects covered by the active focusing points were inside the depth of field), and the user-programmable C1-through-C3 custom settings. Finally, for beginners there was the selection of Sports, Portrait, Landscape, et cetera modes. All in all, this sums up to fifteen possible settings on the mode dial. Yikes!

The LCD panel on top gave you pretty much all the setting info you needed to drive the camera and could be backlit orange for easy reading in dim lighting.

The 40D was a pretty iterative update of the earlier 30D. On the back, the LCD was now a larger 3" screen, up from its predecessor's 2.5" unit, necessitating the relocation of of the buttons from a vertical column to the left of the screen to a horizontal row under it.

Under the hood, the APS-C sized CMOS sensor went from 8.2 to 10.1 megapixels and the 40D got Canon's new DIGIC III image processor, the second camera after the 1D to do so.

Despite being well-received and earning the "Highly Recommended" rating from DPReview, the 40D was one of the shortest-lived prosumer Canons, getting replaced after only a year by the 15MP EOS 50D.

Nowadays you can pick up used 40D bodies for a c-note or less, but they still work great.

DSLR Pics: Draft Animals with the Pentax K20D

Here are a couple of photos from the Pioneer Village farming exhibition at the 2025 Indiana State Fair taken with the Pentax K20D and the DA 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6ED zoom lens.

The upper photo is a straight-out-of-camera JPEG while the lower two were processed from the original PEF (Pentax's RAW format) in Adobe Photoshop.

DSLR Pics: Porsches with the Sony a700

Both photos are straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEGs, shot on different days using the Sony a700. The upper one, the 911 Targa 4 GTS, was snapped with the Sony 16-50mm f/2.8, while the lower 911 Turbo Cabrio used the Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* zoom lens.

Lenses I Live By: The Fast All-Purpose Zoom

I’ve blogged before in this series about “superzooms”, which a lot of folks call “vacation” lenses because they cover a wide range of focal lengths, from wide-angle to long telephoto, obviating the need to bring an array of different lenses on vacation with you.

Thing is, some of your vacation will likely take place indoors, while visits to the zoo tend to happen on nice days, hence why I call these zooms “zoo lenses”. The thing is, the focal length range on these lenses… typically 7X to 10X …precludes both really excellent optical results across the entire focal length range, as well as necessitating slower apertures at longer focal lengths, making them less useful indoors or in otherwise questionable lighting conditions.

Alternatively, most manufacturers make zoom lenses with a slightly shorter focal length range, typically a 24-105mm or 24-120mm equivalent, but better optics and faster apertures, usually a constant f/4 across the whole range, or else an f/2.8-4 or something like that.

These are the real “leave it on the camera all the time” champs for me. They’re long enough for most things short of taking pictures of critters at a distance, and, with any sensor from about 2008 onward, capable of shooting indoors at ISO 800-1000 or so, especially with image stabilization of some sort on tap.

The classics of this genre are full frame lenses from the “Big Two”: Canon’s EF 24-105mm f/4L IS and Nikon’s 24-120mm f/4G VR.

On APS-C size sensors, these translate to 16-70mm and 16-80mm focal length ranges and the heavyweight champion here is the Nikon DX 16-80mm f/3.8-4E VR lens, maybe the best F-mount DX glass ever…

Lastly is my go-to for Micro Four Thirds, the Panasonic 12-60mm Leica DG Vario-Elmarit F2.8-4.0 ASPH, which is a 24-120mm equivalent in that format.

Not a Fossil...Yet

Mazda RX-7 Turbo II, Canon EOS R, EF 24-105mm f/4L IS

On the one hand, the Canon EOS R is the second most modern camera I own. Only the Olympus OM-D E-M1X is newer.

On the other hand, the R was Canon's first full-frame mirrorless effort and was released back in October of 2018, which seems a lifetime ago. My rough cutoff for something qualifying as a "fossil" on this blog is being ten years old or more, and the EOS R is heading that way fast.

Still, it's one of the most affordable ways to get into full-frame mirrorless.

Turn of the Screw

When Canon launched the EOS system with its new EF lens mount in 1987, it was a clean break with past tech. The "Electro Optical System" severed the mechanical linkages between the camera body and lens. The aperture was electro-mechanically actuated, and the focusing was handled by a motor in the lens body itself.

Similarly, when Olympus put out its first DSLR, the E-1, the Four Thirds system represented a clean break from its prior film SLR legacy. All the lenses were from a clean sheet of paper.

The other DSLR makers in the first decade of this millennium were attempting to bridge a gap to prior technology. Nikon, Pentax, and Minolta/Sony all offered cameras with focus motors in the camera body which operated the lens focus via a screw drive.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I had the Sony a700 out for a walk with the 18-200mm zoom lens on it.

I'd been hoping for birds or squirrels, but when I went to shoot some flowers close-up, the whirring as the focus motor spun the lens all the way to the other extreme seemed interminable...