I used this for years until it was stolen by a thief who calmly walked through our student halls and lifted whatever took his fancy. The picture quality wasn't brilliant, but would probably now be a cult camera had it been made in the old Eastern bloc. I first learnt the limitations of flash photography on this camera, but I did look forward to using the flash cube as the heat produced would melt the bulb and the surrounding plastic and create a mini molten sculpture.
I borrowed my brothers camera for a few months afterwards. This was a Voigtlander. A pathfinder camera. I remember this as being quite a significant purchase at the time, in that it seemed to be really expensive. To quote my brother "I ended up with the model without the light meter, something of an agonising decision as I recall as I really wanted the one with the meter."
This was my first 35mm encounter. However, this had developed a paralax problem in that what you saw through the viewfinder was not necessarily what you were taking a picture of. This led to some frustration when developing the photographs!
An Olympus trip followed
This boasted a solar powered exposure metre and 35mm film. A really good compact camera. I took reels of slide film with this on a number of long distance cycling trips, mostly over mountains. However, Digitally rendered slide film lose a lot!
This was a pretty rugged camera and survived being dropped, soaked, baked and frozen a number of times. Eventually though it started to leak light in a very retrolux way. After the demise of the Trip came a couple of Advantix cameras. These were fine but not too rugged!
The Advantix film stored the negatives in the original film reel. Quite a neat idea! I'm not too sure what became of my last Advantix camera, but I expect it is probably hidden somewhere at the back of a dusty cupboard.
Picture quality from this was suprisingly good in bright light, but it was extremely slow at taking anything in reduced light. But I suppose one should never look a gift camera in the lens. This introduced me to the wondrous world of digital image editing. I soon realised what limitations there were to a 2mb image so decided to upgrade to something compact but more powerful.
The Panasonic DMC-TZ3
This is a camera I can hardly fault at all. Without doubt the best compact camera I have used (although, to be fair there isn't much competition ... apart from perhaps the Olympus Trip). I still use it when I don't have space to carry the GX1. This would still be my main camera if I hadn't received a long service lump sum from the company I work for. See my first post!
The GX1 is a powerful beast! This is a micro four thirds camera.
According to Wikipedia "The image sensor of Four Thirds and MFT is commonly referred to as a 4/3" type or 4/3 type sensor (inch-based sizing system is derived from now obsolete video camera tubes). The sensor measures 18 mm × 13.5 mm (22.5 mm diagonal), with an imaging area of 17.3 mm × 13.0 mm (21.6 mm diagonal), comparable to the frame size of 110 film.[3] Its area, ca. 220 mm², is approximately 30% less than the APS-C sensors used in other manufacturers' DSLRs, yet is around 9 times larger than the 1/2.5" sensors typically used in compact digital cameras."
I'm still getting to grips with this camera as there are just so many things you can do with it. My latest discovery is the handy "custom mode" which allows for bespoke settings to be stored and recalled at the merest twidling of a dial. Currently this puts me in black and white, shutter priority, af tracking, multi exposure with a zoom resume set at 25mm (50mm SLR equivalent)
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