Andrew Wyatt wrote:
>
> Are you happy with your Olympus camera? We recently lost our Sony Mavica (Floppy
drive broke, I'm still looking for the replacement parts) so I
purchased (then
returned) a Kodak DX-3500 as a replacement for the Sony. It was a hunk
of junk LOL!
It took the worst quality picture I have ever seen. We are now looking
to settle on
Olympus ourselves, but we haven't ever actually talked to anyone that
owned one.
I have an olympus D-460 Zoom that I'm pretty happy with. If you saw any
of the CTS expo photos (http://www.nks.net/CTS/) I took from the earlier
expo, those were all done with this camera. It has some problems in
low-light, so some of those shots are blurry because I was still trying
to get used to it and hadn't learned you *always* use the flash unless
you're outside.
(Here are more photos I've taken with this camera recently:
http://www.illusionary.com/~dglidden/newHouse/ Once again though, the
first few were taken at dusk, where it was just too dark for the camera
to get a good image, so they're a bit blurry. The others came out very
nicely though.)
The images are sharp (when you use the flash :) and good color. It uses
smartmedia cards so it's cheap enough to get a 64MB card and store ~140
photos on it then transfer with either a PCMCIA or USB adapter. Which
is what you absolutely want to do because this camera only has a serial
interface and you DON'T want to download all those photos over serial!
It has decent battery life but, like so many current digital devices,
doesn't like rechargables. I can only get a few dozen shots with
rechargables, either the Alkaline variety or NiMH. So batteries can get
expensive. (The conspiracy theorist in me sees this as being perfectly
reasonable, since obviously battery companies pay electronics firms to
build power circuits that don't work well with rechargables...)
The zoom is virtually useless, but it has a nice Macro feature (I can
get within about 8" or so of the subject and still get a nice clear
shot) and also has the ability to take up to 15 seconds of Quicktime
movies (no sound of course) that can even be played under Linux with
xmovie. It's got a couple of other bells that I rarely use, but they're
things like exposure bracketing and some nicer "real" photographic
extras rather than useless extra features.
Like every digital camera I've seen, it's not very "fast." Like I said,
without the flash, it's not going to give good shots unless you're
outside under fairly bright sun. I have never used any other digital
cameras though, so I don't know if this misfeature is particular to this
camera, the Olympus brand, or just a side-effect of the very slow
(photographically speaking) CCDs that the cameras use.
It's biggest selling point is price. I've seen it for ~$300 lately (I
think I paid about $350 for it a few months ago) and I've seen very few
digital cameras at that price point that compare. (Sure the expensive
Nikon ones rock, but you can buy three of these cheapies for one nice
Nikon digital...)
Overall I'm pretty happy with it, particularly considering how much I
paid for it.
--
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usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.anti-dmca.org/
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5537/2028
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