Olympus E-410

I am a retired photographer who has used most everything upto and including 8x10 cameras in the studio and the field. Having been extremely disapointed when Minolta got out of the camera business (I have in excess of $10,000 worth of Minolta autofocus lenses and flashes) I was considering making the move to Canon. I saw one of these in a two lens kit and the price was very reasonable. I decided to give it a try given my past very positive experience with Olympus optics (was never overwelmed with their 35mm bodies, the exception being the OM4Ti).

I have three minor complaints about the camera:
*Lack of a PC outlet for studio lighting (corrected with a hotshoe to PC adapter and a radio slave)
*It is a little too small for my hands
*I really hate the TTL "Pre-Flash" ALL digital cameras I have encountered seem to do for TTL. I guess I don't inderstand why 35mm cameras didn't need to do this but digital cameras do (advanced technology taking a step backwards). One advantage you have with the Olympus brand flash unit is the ability to use it in a Non-TTL Auto mode but you could do that with a Vivitar 283 of which I have about a dozen. One nice touch with the Olympus shoe mount flash is the zoom coverage down to 24mm equivalant in 35mm.

On to the positive; The lenses packaged with the camera were Olympus Zuiko zooms, 14mm~45mm (28~90 35mm equiv.) and 40mm~150 (80~300mm equiv.) that were representative of todays state of the art zoom lenses giving decent contrast, color rendition and minimal distortion unless critically tested. Olympus Zuiko made some really fine fixed focal length lenses for 35mm and they offer some nice looking fixed focal length pieces for digital which I will soon be exploring. The Olympus software allows conversion from Olympus RAW file format to tif, jpg, bmp and a variety of other formats while allowing you to choose 8 or 16 bit color depth. In 16 bit, gradation changes very suttely from pixel to pixel, vastly superior to any point-n-shoot digital I have played with to date. I have had the chance to have some 11x14's printed (while shooting at ISO400) and find it hard to believe the quality. Digital has bested film by a considerable margin (given the imaging area) in terms of sharpness and the color is completely acceptable. I could get a better picture using my 8x10 Sinar C with ISO50 Velvia but even I have a difficult time seeing the difference on a 11x14 or 16x20 print. I think the real difference there is the glass used to make that 8x10 transpearancy (very German, VERY expensive).

My positive experience with this camera is drawing me to their system. They make a very advanced pro-level body and have a full complement of pro-level lenses which will meet any need I have of a 35mm size system.