wrong E-3

[rroberto]

I have had my E-3 since the first week in December. I was happy with the camera overall, however, I was

not impressed with the auto-focus which seemed to be no faster than my E-500.

3 weeks ago, the auto-focus stopped working completely. I called Olympus and since there are no repair

places in Portugal, (certainly not in the Azores where I live), I sent the body by post to Olympus in

Germany. Usually, to mail anything from our island to mainland Europe takes a week in each direction. I

need always to have 2 digital bodies in my job. So, on the advice posted here by Gary Siegel, I ordered a

Panasonic Lumix with 14-50 Vario-Elmarit from a shop in the UK, second hand (500 Euros).

To my amazement, the E-3 arrived back from Germany only one day after receiving the Panasonic (the

Panasonic arrived 8 days after ordering).

Meanwhile, I had used the Panasonic on an assignment in Sao Miguel and found that I liked it a lot.

However, the E-3 arrived back and the autofocus did not work. I called Olympus, and rather than send the

camera again for service, they air-posted me a new body immediately!!!!! They also requested I be sure

the new one was perfect before sending the old one back. I am totally amazed at the professionalism and

great service at Olympus!!

The other interesting point is that the new body auto-focuses in about 1/3 the time of the original body.

This is why I have used Olympus since 1974!!!!!!

[manut]

One more reason to be with Olympus :-) I just hope I am also as lucky as you if something similar happens

[harold_gough]

Well, yes. However, back in the 1980s, just when I was getting into the OM system, my dealer informed me that Olympus were getting out of photography and concentrating on microscopes. From then on Tamron were the lenses for me, the Adaptall-2 range being tranferable to whichever camera manufacture remained committed to supporting customers who had invested in their equipment.

[leandro_dutra1]

That your dealer was not well informed is clear from the fact that Olympus never left photography. Had you invested in Zuiko glass, you would still be using it on Olympus Four Thirds (E system) bodies. Not to say your Tamron lenses aren't good, but Zuiko is superb at a reasonable price.

 

Indeed, from sole manufacturer of OM bodies, Olympus came to lead an open standards based system together with Panasonic, Leica and Sigma.

[harold_gough]

My dealer was correct, to the extent that there was a very long period when new Olympus cameras almost completely dissappeared, except of a compact or two. The OM series was abandonned and SLRs became history. There may be holes in the historical accuracy of that but the flavour was what I got at the time.

 

The Tamron lenses I now use, replacing earlier ones, have all the performance (resolution/contrast, lack of distortion, lack of vignetting) that I can use professionally. Apart from shift and bellows lenses, and the 50mm macro, there is no advantage to using Olympus lenses. However, Olympus OM bodies and flash are in a class of their own!

[leandro_dutra1]

The OM-3Ti and OM-4Ti stopped being manufactured in 2002. The E-1 arrived in 2003. In between, there was a reasonable stock of the OM-4Ti in distributors and retailers that survived even the introduction of the E-1, until at least 2004 people were still findind new OM-4Tis in retailers.

 

So how could your dealer be correct?

 

BTW, the Olympus E System (Four Thirds) is again a class of its own!

[brian_godfrey]

Harold is right and so was his dealer. Olympus pretty much abandoned the pro and advanced amateur markets in the late '80s and concentrated on consumer grade cameras. Yeah, they kept making their old OM-4Ti and a few lenses, but they made sure the prices were high enough so that nobody actually bought them, and they did nothing to modernize. The OM4ti was an awesome camera for certain specific things, but it was totally incapable of competing with other mainstream offerings in the general photography market. Olympus also had the fastest autofocus on the market at one time, but they packaged it in the crappiest consumer-grade shell in their history and with the worst lenses. They just couldn't envision where photography was going and so they missed the bus. Now it's going to be a really hard climb back out of the hole they dug themselves. Why were they only able to talk Panasonic (a consumer electronics company, not a camera company) into introducing 4/3 cameras? Why can I only get a few aftermarket lenses from Sigma and a couple from Leica? Nobody else trusts them.

 

I bought the E-510 because it offered Live View and I needed that. I wrote off the camera on my first photo trip to Italy and so I can toss it any time that I feel like something better has come along. Kind of like they tossed their loyal customers away...

[leandro_dutra1]

Both are wrong.

 

Olympus didn't abandoned the market. But the market went autofocus, which was problematic to Olympus due to Honeywell patents. That they were right was proven by the many traditional camera companies that floundered: Konica, Minolta, Yashica...

 

The price of the OM-4Ti (and 3Ti) was just a consequence of limited production due to the lack of appeal to the masses of a manual focus camera. Kind of like Leica.

 

The reason the Four Thirds System is so restricted is that most companies just inherited autofocus systems, for example Sony gobbling up Minolta, Samsung partnering with Pentax? but who knows what future has in stock? Which chinese companies will come along and want to enter the fray?

 

I don't understand you about writing off the camera. What do you mind precisely?

[brian_godfrey]

I was there. There were a LOT of Olympus owners asking for more modern manual focus lenses, for example, and we were ignored. Most of their zooms, for example, were dismal in comparison to what you could get from Tamron for half the price. Ever look through the 75-150/4 zoom? I shot a laser through mine one day and it fractured into hundreds of beams. Even a good lens will usually have a few straggler beams but not hundreds.

They had the ability. The 90/2 macro lens that I still have stashed somewhere around here is probably one of the sharpest lenses I've ever used.

They canceled the OM-1 - a great manual backup camera even in the 1990s. And they did have autofocus, it did work well and faster than anyone else, but they cheesed on the bodywork (camera and lens). Their service became poor. I could probably go on but I'm tired of it.

 

What do I mind about the E-510? That's not the point. The E-510 does what I bought it to do. It is the company that I have no confidence in. I'm not going to go out and replace the E-510 until I need to, but when I need to, I will look around and see what's the best way to go. I'm certainly not going to be investing in lenses for it. They do have some decent lenses now, but I don't trust them anymore. They have lost my loyalty. If you are in business, any business, re-read this and think about how you run your own business. It is very difficult to earn a good reputation and very easy to lose it.

[leandro_dutra1]

I know there were lots of Olympus owners. The question is, were they enough to justify an investment in the OM system in the face of steep Honeywell royalties? I doubt it. Check Maitani's interview at http://www.geocities.com/maitani_fan/om_interview_2.html; he seems sorry not to have provided autofocus in professional (OM-[1-4]) cameras, but he asserts Olympus' difficulties in doing so.

 

The OM-1 was obsolete, get over it. The present -- even at the time, not the future -- was the OM-3Ti. As Maitani states, capital costs for mass produced items is huge, so the only alternative is to hand make niche items, and that was what lead to Leica-like prices.

 

The autofocus they had was in an amateur body. How much would have cost for it to make the grade into the professional system, and how much would have Olympus had to pay to Honeywell and lawyers? Minolta for one did try, and now we have Sony.

 

I see where you come from, as as you see in his interview so does Maitani. But that seems to be a game Olympus couldn't play, not being at the time neither a huge player in the SLR market like Cannikon; and the hand-made goods player game as by Leica isn't fit for the electronics side of business, as witness the difficulties with the M8 and the Digital Modul R.

 

In the end, we have to choose between a great, coherent system like Four Thirds that is maturing and slowly closing the gap in some aspects with Cannikon, while having some incoparable stuff; and some hodgepodge systems that won't go away from Cannikon and now Sony, Pentax. I choose the coherent system, and I think it was just as well thought-out as the OM one, accounting for the added complexities of the digital age, and will probably endure at least as much.

 

Zuiko primes are still great, and still work in the digital age. I hope Zuiko Digital autofocus zooms will still do fourty years hence after the next revolution.