Olympus D-300L

Opinion: Don't bother - just a kids toy - have owned product for several years and
only gives good results in perfect light conditions. Used only to get my
pictures out whilst waiting for film to be processed. Give it to your kids
to play with.

Opinion: The one and only other review of this camera was not complimentary at all, so I thought I'd balance the scorecard with mine. The D-300L was a great camera at a fairly reasonable price... when it came out 5 years ago! Sure it gets the $^!+ kicked out of it by current models, but that's to be expected. At the time, it was one of the few 1024x768 camera available for well under $1000. I just upgraded to a Canon G1 which is head and shoulders above the D-300L in performance, features and value *today*, but this camera would have cost $10,000+ if you could have gotten anything like it back then. As it is, I got hundreds of beautiful shots out of my D-300L, and have been very satisfied with it. It has not a scratch on it after 4 years, and it works as well as the day I bought it. I bought a Canon this time around, but I wouldn't have hesitated to buy another Olympus if they'd had exactly the feature set I was looking for.

The biggest shortcoming of the D-300L is that you have no control over the degree of compression that is applied to images. It stores 30 1024x768x24-bit images in 6MB of internal memory, which translates to a compression ratio of about 12:1. JPEG artifacts become quite noticable at this level, especially with certain subjects like human faces. For landscape and other nature shots, it was much less of a problem.

No, you wouldn't want to buy one of these today, but that doesn't make it a bad camera, just an outdated one. Today you can buy a D-370L that addresses every one of the D-300L's age-related shortcomings and then some for $200. The only thing it lacks is an optical zoom, and for that you'd have to step up to the $350-$400 range today.

Opinion: A great workhorse...used it for years before upgrading to a Kodak. Never had any problems with it, and even today, the images it produces are better than many of the lower end digital cameras.

Opinion: I purchased the Japanese model of this camera in Japan, so I had it months before it showed up on the US market.

I still like the camera, as it takes good pictures for web applications and it looks and feels like a standard point and shoot.

The camera also has stood the test of time -- daily use for years in all sorts of weather here in Alaska. Its design also allowed it to be stowed under a heavy jacket in extremely cold weather and fished out for pictures at temperatures as low as -45 to -50 degrees F.

My wife still uses this camera for documenting and communicating design and assembly processes and procedures for a collaborative rocket payload design project. She also uses it to illustrate monthly articles she writes for a Japanese e-newspaper.

The performance of this camera and my Olympus OM film cameras, lead me to purchase a Olympus E-10 which has taken over much of my digital imaging duties.