eNough

I wasn't sure whether to post this here or over on rashbre snapped because its sort of about photography. But I think it's more about eBay, and a little bit daft, so here is probably okay.

The story was that a few days ago I dug out my old film camera, with a view to taking some film pictures. I discovered it was somewhat broken. The mirror had jammed and the viewfinder had some sort of black gunk in it. A Google later and I realized it was going to be expensive to fix. I also noticed in the Google search a few eBay cameras roughly the same, for relatively small money.

It got me thinking that perhaps I could replace the broken camera and even acquire a small number of lenses to augment the two that I already owned.

My criteria was that this had to be an inexpensive project, so I set myself a very low budget. I decided on Olympus because (a) its what I had before (b) its beautiful, well designed precision machinery, (c) its not Nikon or Canon where there are lots of buyers trying to acquire old lenses for their digital equipment and pushing the price up. I regard it as a kind of SLR version of a Leica.

The plan all worked rather well. A few days later, I have everything I could possibly need. A camera with a fine lens was my first acquisition and then a couple of other wide angle lenses. All good. Then a pair of zoom lenses, which happened to have another Olympus camera attached.

Altogether, it was somewhat less than the cost of a modest new digital compact, and I now have a rather fine film kit. In some ways its sad that this type of equipment is viewed by many as obsolete, yet the modern camera makers are only just geting to the same resolution as film and only in their top range £2,000+ cameras.

One thing I can't get over is how small it all looks next to today's DSLRs. Yet, although it has manual focus is mainly mechanical and doesn't need 150 computerised menus, it seems to take some nice snaps already.