The Olympus Camedia E-20p – A Vintage DSLR That Grew on Me

[John Seaman]

The ebay lot of three “ex-college surplus” cameras consisted of a Pentax with a 35-80 lens, a Nikon F401 with a 28-85 lens, and the 5MP Olympus Camedia E-20p. I mainly bought it for the lens on the Nikon.

Looking at the online pictures, the Camedia didn’t seem all that exciting, it looked to me like a typical plastic bridge camera of a certain era, with no real indication of scale. When it came I was surprised to find a quite large and heavy metal bodied camera with a very nice fixed 9-36mm F/2.0 lens. It needed some TLC, in particular the hand grip had deteriorated to a sticky mess, so I scraped and cleaned it all off leaving a smooth surface. Otherwise it was in surprisingly good shape for a 2001 student camera. It came with the original lens cap, dedicated Camedia case and strap

It runs off four AA cells, I had problems at first as it was quite demanding on batteries. Once I had it powered up I began to work out what everything did, the handbook being still available online. User interfaces have become somewhat standardised nowadays, but back then the controls seemed to be scattered randomly over the body. There are a lot of external buttons and levers, but they are well labelled and it seems clear Olympus wanted to allow access to the various functions without delving into the menus. It didn’t take long to work everything out

It has an era typical 1.8 inch LCD, which has limited tilting facility. I thought at first the viewfinder would be electronic, but no, it’s a very decent optical finder. For this is indeed a full SLR rather than a bridge camera. Instead of a mirror it has a fixed Porro prism which diverts the image onto a secondary sensor, enabling live view. It was only the second DSLR with live view, the first being its very similar 4MP predecessor, the E-10.

Although it’s only 5MP, and the ISO and shutter speed ranges are very limited, I enjoyed using it , it has grown on me with use. I found the images taken in good conditions very pleasing, surely printable to A3 with a little care, and the lens has no obvious distortion. There are dual memory slots, for Compact Flash and Smart Media cards. It records images as JPEG, Tiff and Raw (CRF) - the CRF files can still be processed in the CS5 Raw converter .

The E20P was angled towards professionals, with just P,ASM modes, no consumer “scene modes” . It had a hefty price tag of $1700, still much less than many DSLR’s of the period.

Here’s the camera and a couple of its images. That’s it and thanks for looking.

Edited March 6 by John Seaman

[Sanford]

I have one, or maybe the previous model...stuck away in a closet with a moldy lens. Why do we keep these things. Beautifully made camera, mine runs on AA batteries and you had to take a box of spares.

Edited March 6 by Sanford

[John Seaman]

17 hours ago, Sanford said:

Why do we keep these things.

One more thing, The normally bright finder goes really dim when the camera is switched off, I think this is because with no mirror. the sun could cause damage if the lens cap is left off. So it stops the aperture right down to avoid this.