"Olympus 810"

Oops... another few yen landed in my pocket, so I rushed off to empty my pockets towards another new camera - this time an Olympus 810 - a cool looking camera that is interestingly nearly opposite my Ricoh R4 in what it can and cannot due, but that was the idea in buying it after all!  The Ricoh has a lot going for it - it's fast to start up, fast to take pictures, and fast to process them, allowing for fairly rapid image recording.  What's not to my liking is how it works in artificial low-light situations, which is where the Olympus works well.  But after taking about 1,800 pictures with the Ricoh, the Olympus feels really really slow!  It takes a couple of seconds to take a picture and takes a few seconds to process each picture taken.  Rapid recording of a high volume of images is best left to another camera... unless this issue is due to the memory card being slow, in which case it could be remedied by buying a faster card....

In any case, at the moment, I'm thinking that I'll be dividing the use of these two cameras along those lines - speed for the Ricoh and available light night pictures for the Olympus.  What I really want, by the way, is a camera with a good f1.4 (or f1.2 or f1.8) lens that is still convenient to use otherwise.  In the highly competitive camera market, price is a big issue and the lens is where the manufacturers are saving money.  They have to buy the CCDs and can't hide the pixel count, but since most people only understand the focal length of lenses and not the aperture, that's what gets shortchanged....

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/