With the current marketing trend towards digital it seems
to me that the best thing to suggest to Olympus to keep the
OM system alive is for them to create a DIGITAL OM body.
It would, of course have an OM lens mount and would accept
all the OM accessories -- lenses, flashes and the like, exept
for those items that are Film specific --- motor drives, winders,
databacks and such.
Olympus kind of has this approach with their IS-series 35mm
cameras and their D-500 and D-600 digital cameras ( as well
as the Centurion APS camera). They are all ZLRs and have
a similar "look". Why not extend that to the OM lineup? Assuming
the bodies would be reasonably priced ($400 to $1000?) I
think it would encourage many folks with an existing OM
Film based system to buy a body that would allow them to
extend their system to digital.
As far as I know, the only cameras out there now like this are the
Kodak cameras (forget the model numbers) that accept either
Canon or Nikon lenses ( if forget which). They came out
a while ago , in electronics terms and had image arrays
of 1500x1000 pixels and 3000x2000 pixels for the standard
36mm x 24mm image area of a 35mm frame. Since CCD's
are electronic and seem to be following the price declining
curve it seems reasonable that soon an SLR body could be
developed using pixel densities in this realm.
Leica has also recently come out with a digital camera -- the
S1 -- that has 5140 x 5140 pixels (at 36 bit color depth) in a
36mm by 36mm frame. This is NOT a hand-held camera but
rather is a studio camera -- and it now costs something like
$20,000. But it does accept the Leica M (Bayonet rangefinder)
and R (SLR) lenses. It also accepts other makers lenses with
suitable adapters. The noteworthy thing is that it has a high
enough resolution so that LEICA claims that it is limited by
the resolution of the lens, NOT the CCD device and that it
makes images of the same quality as a transparency.
What this says is that CCD's are now available that rival
the resolution of Film.
The first digital SLR's wouldn't have to use the absolute
last word in CCD technology but could use the ones that
fit the present price/performace "sweet spot" of the time.
I'll bet within a few years the CCD's that rival film in resolution
will come down to high-end consumer prices.
Has this matter been considered or discussed on this
group before?
Mark Hammons
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