Olympus D-300L

Opinion: Dave Baay is right on. I bought this camera back in November of 96 for $800 and some coin. It was (in my opinion) the best consumer level digital camera at the time. It did what it was suppposed to do. TAKE PICTURES! I would love to find a camera today that focuses it's efforts on taking pictures and stop wasting time making it shoot mpeg or voice recording. I dropped this camera on the ground at least half a dozen times. Eventually a peice or the case broke but it still keeps taking good pictures. I have taken well over 8000 pictures with this camera and i still use it from time to time. It's so easy to use that i could train my dog to use it even without opposing thumbs. In fact i am finally going to retire it to my 2 year old this weekend, he really wants to take pictures like daddy. Perhaps he will be able to pass it on to his son someday.

Opinion: I feel I just have to write about this camera too. i bought one when it was the first camera I known that droped under $1000 in 1997. I have traveled around the world with that camera and a zip-drive and used it for every party or just holiday-standard pictures. I have taken over 7000 photos with it. There are some bad behaviours about it like the slow cable (11 minutes for 6Mb), slow memory (6 secs before next shot), the LCD is EATING battery and there is no zoom.

Opinion: prima camera voor niet te veel geld,zeer goed contrast,helder beeld,ontdanks een lagere resolutie dan de nieuwere types,flits van dichtbij geeft iets overbelichting,makkelijke bediening,

Opinion: Proof it's not what you've got but the way you use it. Check out
Hiroshi Kamakura (http://www.dpcorner.com/pros/pro01.shtml & http://
www.kamakurart.com ) to see that artists will utilise anything and
produce...well...art!

ps...I've not used this camera at all but just wanted to make a point!

Opinion: I bought my d 300l about a year ago through e bay as a store closeout.
I take it with me wherever I go and use it often. I have never been disappointed with its results. I feel that its a perfect intro level camera that anyone can operate and get good results.
Eventually I'll upgrade to newer digital technology,which far surpasses the ability of the d 300l, but for its age, this is a fine camera and I would recommend it for anyone who wants or needs a small simple digital camera for reasonably low cost.

Opinion: Ive had this camera for 4 years now. Aside from the slow download I've found it to be quite useful. Still does everything I need it to do and I don't intend on upgrading any time soon. But if I do it will certainly be another Olympus!

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.

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: 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.