Lawrence Ripsher

I thought I made my point that film was the best compact camera. But if you’re not convinced by my irrefutable arguments then take a look at what also caught my eye today. Just recently announced:

- Olympus SP-550 UZ: 18x ultra zoom. This one is my favourite and is doing a good job at convincing me that it’s not a want that I have, but a genuine need. So this has an 18x zoom. Lol, I laughed also. God knows what I’d use that for given my current longest focal length is currently a 70mm equivalent on a DX sensor. But when there is a genuine need for such equipment, I think it’s important not to ask yourself distracting questions such as this. Other things I liked was the in camera Image Stabilisation (through a shifting CCD) and the lens which is both pretty fast (2.8 – 4.5) and wide angle (starts at 28mm). The Oly-lovers are going bonkers over this it seems.

- Olympus Stylus 770 SW. Another great toy, I mean, serious photographic tool. This is the latest release of the underwater series – the cameras you can pretty much take anywhere with you without additional housing. Waterproof up to a depth of 10M, you can also drop this from 1.5M or interestingly, place a load of 100kg on it. For the metric-ly challenged, that’s about 220 bags of sugar all piled up on top of one another (unfortunately, if you saw such a strange site, you wouldn’t be able to take a picture as your camera would be at the bottom of the pile of course but it’d be a nice memory).

- Olympus FE-250. So, not much to mention about this one other than to drop in the fact that it supports an ISO of 10,000. Lol I know, I thought I was seeing the comma in the wrong place also. I think DPreview summed it up nicely: "Now we may be jumping the gun here, but we suspect there may be some sacrifice in quality involved. Either that or Olympus has – in a £200 compact – re-written the laws of physics".

I gotta say tho, Olympus are certainly putting their best minds into turning out creative bits of kit. I predict a resurgence of this great brand. If you like this sort of thing, it’s nice to see a company innovating in ways other than by just adding megapixels to their increasingly crammed sensors. Olympus already have some of the best glass in the industry for their pro range and this year I am confident they’ll produce some market shaking DSLR’s to go along with it.