The screen shot says it all really... "The current does not have administrator's privileges" Well, Mr Olympus-San, a) yes he has, and b) why the hell does he need to log on as admin to run a bloody (third-rate) photo management application ?

Well, I finally picked up an Olympus E-3 a week ago. I immediately compared ergonomics with a D300 (E3 viewfinder is better) and a 40D ("Tonka Toy" comes to mind), and it feels good, BUT it doesn't have the "take me home" gut feel I got from the E-1. Whatever. I thought a bit about the lens issue, and decided that the 12-60 doesn't have compelling arguments for me over the 11-22 & 14-54 I already have. So I decided to go and get the E-3 body. Whilst I was waiting for an assistant, I started to think a bit.... does it really have much to offer over the E-1 & E-400 I already have ? E-400 gives me 10Mpix. E-1 gives me all weather capability, and prints up to A3 (I doubt I'll ever need bigger). Almost all of my "ok" shots (I haven't progressed to "good" yet) are taken on tripod, so IS is of little use to me. LV would be useful sometimes, I think, although I'm not certain. The 30 min exposure would be a definite plus, if the noise is controlled enough (and no reviewer has even mentioned this yet).... So, on balance, I wondered would that E-3 improve my photography, or enjoyment of photography ? The answer, clearly, was "unlikely". And so I walked out of shopping therapy.

The anoraks over at DPReview's Olympus forum have gone into righteous outrage mode over a recent article by veteran commentator Thom Hogan, who, one would assume from said outrage, had compared Olympus' new E-3 with the spawn of Satan. So what was this provocative article all about ? Well, in fact, it was a well reasoned outsider analysis of Olympus' declared ambition to grab 20% of the DSLR market. Hogan (correctly, in my opinion) describes this as "dreaming", pointing out that the only realistic way Olympus would make up the 12 to 14% shortfall they need to meet their target would be to steal it from Canon. Are the likely to do this ? Well, one would hope that even the most blinkered zealot would be forced to answer "probably not". However good the current Olympus range is - and it is good enough for me - it would have be near miraculous to overturn Canon's inertia in the market, even if Canon's offering was poor, which it clearly is not. Does it actually matter, to an Olympus customer who just wants to take photos ? I would say only if Olympus' market share were to drop so far that their position would be untenable, and that seems equally unlikely. Sure, people with an investment in the E-System want it to stick around, and the anoraks in particular want new toys to buy every few months, to make measurements with. But whatever, the E-System won't be around forever. Probably neither will Canon's EOS. Nothing lasts forever, but I doubt that Olympus is going to exit the market tomorrow, and even if they did, the cameras and lenses are not going to stop working. However, if you really want future proofing, it is undeniable that Nikon has by far the best record in the SLR market, with Pentax and Leica not too far behind. But did Hogan, a Nikon fan, point that out ? Nope. He said that the E-510 and E-3 are nice cameras, but they're not going to provoke a cataclysmic shift in the market. A view worthy of derogation, scorn, and insults ? Apparently so. Thank God for the Internet...

Well it can't be long now. The PR machine is creaking into gear, rumour and counter-rumour is flying about, entrenched positions are being dug firmly in. The reign of the longest living DSLR (?) in the short history of DSLRs, the Olympus E-1, is about to come to an end. We all have our shopping lists, but having recently dragged the E-1 briefly out of retirement, alongside the E-400, there are a couple of things I really hope we get:

• An even better viewfinder than the E-1, with record-breaking magnification. Comparing the E-1 to the E-400, on this particular feature the E-400 is hit for 6
• Hugely improved autofocus. This 3 point AF can't go on. It has improved a lot between the E-1 and the E-400, but it still isn't very good
• A screen that is actually useful for something
• Horizontal info display in the viewfinder please. The vertical version drives me crazy. Oh, and is ISO in the display really too much to ask for ?

Of course, I can't actually afford to buy it, but that doesn't stop me wishing 😊

Well, here is my first post on this blog for about 6 months. Having resurrected the site, I had to spend some time reversing out of some changes I'd made which in particular affected this blog. As I wrote elsewhere, I've decided to drop the major makeover and just make detail improvements when time allows. I'm not terribly happy with the site, especially with the design of the photo galleries, which is really getting creaky, but for now it will have to do. In the interim I haven't had a lot of time for photography, but I did end up buying an Olympus E-400. You can see some photos from it here (and many more, for now, on my Flickr pages). I was quite smitten by the E-400 the first time I picked it up. Reverting back to a "classic" shape has allowed Olympus to create a DSLR much smaller than most others, but without sacrificing handling, at least for me. It has more or less replaced the E-1, as really there is little if anything that the E-1 does significantly better. It is a little more fiddly than the E-1 in manual mode, due to the lack of a second dial, and things like DOF preview are awkward. But the image quality more than makes up for it, and when paired with the 14-45mm lens, it really is a quite practical "take it anywhere" DSLR. It doesn't _quite_ fit in a pocket, but it isn't far off. The screen menu easily makes up for the lack of a settings panel. The fast access to parameters, and the clever way in which you can go deeper into options settings if you need to, but have the basics right up front, is really excellent. Ok, dedicated buttons for things like ISO, AF mode, drive mode, etc, are certainly very nice to have, but you can't have such a compact body as well as all the E-1 buttons and controls, and the compromises that are made are made very well. To be honest, it doesn't quite have the "wow" factor that the E-1's ergonomics and handling gives me and many others, but for every day use, it is really a very fine camera, and one which, unlike say the Nikon D40, caters for beginners, without in any way ruling out advanced users. I'll post more on the E-400 in weeks to come.