Digital Photography Kit: Olympus C-2500L SLR Digital Camera, Epson Photo 1270 - Brief Article - Evaluation

Whole Earth, Winter, 2000 by Sb

The combination of this Olympus camera and Epson printer was the crossover moment for me. I've been a professional photographer (on and off) with film since 1960. Now I'm a digital photographer to stay, and happier than I ever was with film. Digital is now more convenient, cheaper, more malleable, more forgiving, and more directly usable in Power Point presentations, e-marl attachments, and on the Web. With the Epson printer I get handier prints that are the equal in quality of anything I got from film from my own darkroom work or commercial shops.

In particular the Olympus C-2500L does all the work of an excellent SLR (single lens reflex) film camera. It offers all manner of options in terms of settings, degrees of resolution, and in-camera viewing of images. Each image can hold a hefty 2.5 megapixels of data. Even reduced to 1-to-7 JPEG compression, they still print big 8 x 10-inch color prints that look tike excellent film prints, only with far more adaptability. Best of all, since shooting digital means you can be "wasteful" of film (there's no film), the camera has enormous storage capacity in two different systems (called flash systems), SmartMedia (up to 64 megs) and Compact Flash (up to 256 megs and growing). So in my normal shooting I can take 250 high-quality images in one go. Download those to my laptop (you need to get a flash reader device to do it quickly), and I'm ready for another 250 images. The camera comes with a battery charger and very good Camedia software for viewing, printing, and lightly manipulating the pictures--cropping, brightness, contrast, some color correction, etc. For most of my pictures I never bother with PhotoShop. Result ... even this jaded professional photographer and his unjaded wife are now shooting all the time, and when you shoot all the time you get amazing stuff including the most familiar (and in time most important) things like morning sun in the kitchen.

With the Epson Photo 1270 Printer (which works fine doing ordinary printing) you get shockingly good color prints at something under a dollar a print, and you get them right now, exactly the way you want. The printer can handle 11 x 14-inch prints and even long panoramas (which the Camedia software can stitch together). Friends who see the prints want the whole system. For $1,600 total (including a USB flash storage reader), they're there.

(Incidentally, great comparison reviews of all digital cameras can be found at www.steves-digicams .com/hardware_ reviews.html)

Olympus C-2500L SLR Camera
$1,000 street
from, for example, Amazon

Epson Stylus Photo 1270 Printer
$440 street
from, for example, Amazon