I feel like I’m going out on a high note with this image.
Just before I put the Oly kit up for sale on eBay, I shot for a few minutes to make sure everything was working correctly. Maybe I was also taking one last look to make sure I really wanted to part with my first DSLR.
Well, it’s all been sold now and rather than missing the camera, I will look back fondly on the year or two that I shot with it. The images the camera produces are beautiful, if not up to current resolution standards. They match the 6 megapixel resolution that I get from the photo lab scans of my film images, so they seem more film-like than the Nikon images which have a different feel to them.
I decided against the E-3 in the end only because Nikon offered more to me in the D300. I wasn’t impressed by the E-3 images I was seeing, while the D300 images were often quite remarkable. Now that I have the D300, that’s been confirmed for me personally.
In the end, I think Olympus made one critical error at the start of the digital era: their target was 35mm film. They calculated, based on physical constraints, that the 4/3rds format could eventually equal 35mm film resolution and sensitivity. They therefore could create a camera to replace the best 35mm in the digital domain.
Unfortunately, the major manufacturers, Nikon and Canon, with their commitment to legacy technology compromised regarding theoretical constraints. The quality was behind Oly at the time of the E-1, but was good enough. There are now technological fixes for many of those compromises which ironically now has pushed the Nikon and Canon cameras beyond the quality that was achieved by 35mm film. Resolution equals or exceeds 35mm while sensitivity is now much better than film ever was.
This was really clear to me this week as I was shooting with the Leica in San Francisco. It’s winter and SF is hilly, so one starts losing the light early. Soon I had the camera set “wide open” as I think of it, at f2.0 with 1/30th of a second. Because I’m using nominally rated ISO 400 film that really looks better at ISO 320. And I’m think to myself how these ISOs on the D300 are just normal, with ISO 1600 starting to show degradation. I get two more stops of sensitivity with digital now, allowing me to shoot into early evening much more effectively. The film is purely for the look of film plus rangefinder.