Søk i denne bloggen og Lenker

torsdag 9. oktober 2014

Olympus Leave A Generation Behind....no DSLR, No Play

My little foray into the LX100 and wish list for mFt are kind of side shows to what is creeping up on me.

It is not for me that my DSLR is out of date, a 2010 model. If we had no digital and it had not been stolen and divested then my two body OM system would have been serviced and used today, I did not like AF when it came out and get frustrated by it now.

My problem is that I am finally outgrowing my Olympus E450, I have gone to many of the edges of its performance envelope and come back happy, but increasingly frustrated.

I was set to upgrade through first the swd 12/60 and then a new body and the 50-200 but the E5 was a bit of a too little too late from the company who obviously had their eyes set on bigger gross margin in the PEN series. Okay you could do a really good travel pro set up for under 4000 euros or dollars but  then you just were not really getting a pro level camera.. Then the D90 blew it away, all be it without weather sealing.

Olympus have tried with the OMD EM1 to put on chip PDAF as we predicted so that it would function with the expensive glass. But wait, I dont have the glass and it does not work ALL that well anyway. Also the OMD has less than great ergonomics for me. Yeah, small light and weather proofed.

Given the f stop equivalent of APS-c for the fast lenses is about f3.5 then you start to see that DOF control is still lacking in the mFT system for the price of those rather extortionate fast lenses, especially the new zooms. There is no legacy glass to call on which will work acceptably.

Surely Olympus should look at the figures and just see if it is worth putting the tooling out to Thailand OEM and getting the 16mpx sony chip into the E5 body and making a cheaper non articulating lens version also with WR to compete with the only other sub 1000 usd with lens system, the pentax K50?  Alas no. OMD sells in torrents, PENS in deluges so sating the tiny appetite of keen E series users is.

Actually I dare say you could do a whole load of tests and conclude the K50 with its two base zoom lenses f3.5 are actually better than the E5 and the 12-60/50-200mm at well under half the price. So olympus would be making a new system which is likely to be twice as expensive as its main rival in quality, with the only advantages being size/weight and glass investment assets from before.

The really irritating thing for me wanting to upgrade is the fact that so many Olympus users ARE enthusiasts. There are not the droves of CaNikoSon where there is a good second hand market and people often just want rid of stuff they got as presents, or see as no longer trendy or just not used. So Oly have held their value of the dearer glass. 400 euros for the two serious first lenses each, the 50mm macro and the 14/54 Mrk II both of which will be five years old or more, and both of which will have been well used by said enthusiasts.

As with Olympus OM glass and all the Tamron - sigma OM mounted guff from the 80s, even a good enough lens fantastic for its day will loose any value. In fact holding on to them just too long means that suddenly, suddenly everyone wakes up to see that the world has moved so far on from your original system that it is obsolete. Worthless.  The value of putting SWD as a new or used purchase onto EM1 is negligible , you are getting an oversized, over priced, bad deal.

I have seen one 14-54 and one 12-60 bundled in with a Exxx hundred series camera and the kit lenses, for around five hundred euros, but you know what, a five year old lens which has the E5 as the latest usable body is not worth that. I would pay 700 euros for the two SWD zooms, not a penny more and they would have to work.

Ingen kommentarer:

Legg inn en kommentar