> Yeah, Oly really assumed a leadership role in that situation.
I've been thinking about this a little bit. Even though Olympus
abandoned the OM line in the mid-nineties (effectively, but I
say eighties), they didn't sit on their hands in film camera
development.
I think of the IS line. I believe they were on the right path,
but never developed it out with interchangeable lenses. I really
like my IS-3 and still use it on occasion. Had I not been
smoking something wierd when I put together my backpacking
outfit, I'd have just packed the IS-3 with my XA as a backup.
They surely demonstrated the ability to create a zoom lens with
world-class optics. I'd love for them to reintroduce that lens
in the E-mount. That camera nailed flash exposures like nothing
else by truely using distance and background lighting
calculation. Lots of digitals do this today, but they use this
stupid preflash nonsense which overrides any distance
information anyway.
I think the Olympus learned a few lessons along the way with the
IS series and when the E-10 came out, they corrected almost all
of the mistakes. The UI of the IS cameras made the camera
horribly inconvenient to manual focus with. There was no AF+MF
type of capability in the IS cameras and the zoom function was
video-camera styled with the buttons always positioned wrong
when shooting verticals. The failure to put a focus ring on the
lens barrel (even if it was fly-by-wire), and put a backlight
behind the LCD proved to make the camera nearly unusable in some
situations. But the autofocus was remarkably fast in the IS-3.
How they decided to whack the Spot-Meter button from the E-1 is
beyond me. This was an Olympus hallmark for 20 years and they
go and leave it out of the E-1? What a boneheaded move. This
was the greatest feature of the IS-series and even my lowly A1
has that capability.
Anyway, Olympus saw the writing on the wall jumped from the film
ship before getting themselves established in the digital ship.
At least Nikon had the decency of giving the userbase a good
digital alternative (D2HS, D2X, D200) before shooting a
cannonball through the hull of their film boat.
AG
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