I've acquired a few more digicams in recent months and I've been having a lot of fun testing them out. I decided to carry my Olympus Camedia D-595 Zoom with me this week to get adequately familiar with it. I love the photos straight out of camera and I'm excited to share some highlights of the week with you! But first, a little bit about this camera.
*Some photos are slightly color graded, but most are SOOC. No grain or texture was added to the photos-- that's the camera's doing. 🖤
The D-595Z (or C-500 Zoom if you're outside the US) was announced on February 17, 2005 (I was about to be a high school freshman!) and was released later that year. Its compact body houses a CCD sensor and 5 megapixels-- which lands it right in my preferred spec range for digicams. It has an ISO range of 50-250 and a 38-114mm focal length (equivalent). The rear wheel allows users to select their desired shooting mode: auto, program, manual, video (lol), scene, self-portrait, action, nighttime, landscape, and portrait. It has a small rear screen and a somewhat accurate optical viewfinder. The camera requires an xD picture card, which isn't the easiest or cheapest to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to collect several with my various cameras. Luckily, it takes two AA batteries, but rechargeable NiMH batteries are recommended. If you're just getting into digicams/old digital cameras, grab a pack of rechargeable batteries. I've found that some of my cameras won't work properly with anything less. Even brand-new AA batteries won't give me more than a minute or two before the camera automatically shuts off-- if it powers on at all.
The battery performance of this little camera is one of the things that impressed me the most. I carried it around with me for an entire week. I went out and shot daily, keeping it on while I walked around parks, neighborhoods, and cities. It never once gave me a low battery warning, nor did I have to charge the batteries. At the time of writing this-- two weeks since I started carrying it around with me-- it's still showing that it's fully charged.
The camera itself is plastic fantastic and lightweight but still feels nicely balanced in the hands. Using the camera is straightforward, though it does take a few seconds to turn on, and depending on the shooting mode, it may take an extra second or two to process and write to the memory card before it's ready to take another photo. I wouldn't depend on it to take anything time-sensitive or that requires rapid-fire shots, especially in poor light. That said, it has a really strong flash and produces a decent fill flash.
This is a camera I use to slow down and simply enjoy the process of shooting. Overall, this camera is fun and nostalgic.
Photos with saturated blues, dramatic shadows, and sometimes punchy colors are among my favorite shots SOOC from my D595Z. I took several photos of facades at sunset for this exact reason.
If some of these shots seem familiar it's because I took a few duplicates with both this camera and my E-M5 that I took with me to Pittsburgh last week. It was really fun seeing how two different cameras interpret the same scene. I really enjoyed carrying one digicam with me for an entire week, so much so that I'll be carrying another one with me this upcoming week. Keep an eye out for that post in the near future!
