It’s a great question. Sony are producing some great cameras, Pentax are now leading the way in terms of “prosumer” sensor size, Cannon continue to deliver quality (if lacking a little innovation) and Nikon have 4 or 5 entry level bodies that get rave reviews in every magazine and website.
For me it comes down to a few things. A year ago, the Olympus E-510 was one of a handful of cameras that delivered Live View, Image Stabilization, a 10mp sensor in an incredibly compact size. Additionally, two of the best photographers that I know personally, namely Martin Phillimore, and John Akar all said the same thing: “It’s all about the glass”
Now, both guys use Cannon and have either the cash or the necessity to own L-Series lenses. For the uninitiated, these are the top-spec lenses for Canon and amongst the best lenses commercially available and also amongst the most expensive.
Unfortunately, I don’t have £1,000 to spend on a camera body, let alone a lens. Both Canon and Nikon users agree that their respective ‘kit’ lenses (the ones that come with the camera) are very poor. Which means their entry and mid-range cameras might be a bit cheaper but will require an additional investment in glass.
Olympus make lenses, they make lenses for microscopes, telescopes, cameras and a whole range of medical and scientific instruments that require a piece of glass. And they’ve been doing it very quietly and very well for a long time.
Olympus’s lens range makes a lot of sense. There are three categories, “skint”, “less skint” and “rich”. Or “happily married”, “unhappily married” and “divorced”. The kit lenses are brilliant, score highly in every test, regardless of how scientific they are and the 14-42 is widely recognized as one of the best kit lenses.
So I went with Olympus, good lenses at a good price and the two lens kit gives me a reach of 28mm to 300mm in 35mm terms. I love the camera, it’s intuitive, has sensible shortcut buttons, an easy to understand menu tree, the lenses are cool, the image stabilization works.
But
RAW!!!! Whilst I can understand the limitations of JPEG, every camera produces a file that can be read, edited and processed by any piece of software. Why are Canons RAWs different to Nikons different to Olypmpus
I have Photoshop CS3, but in order to expose/edit/modify my RAW files I have to use Olympus master..Olympus’s bundled picture editor. It is slow, it crashes a lot, it is incredibly limited. So my workflow has to be…take picture…then process the RAW in Olympus Master…then play with it in PS…arghhh! It takes hours to do it this way.
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