In the early 2010s the Olympus XZ-1 and XZ-2 were among of the best pocket cameras you could buy.
Both models feature two control wheels (a customizable wheel around the front of the lens that clicks with each rotation and the standard one surrounding the 4 way navigation stick on the back), could shoot in Full Manual and Priority modes, had RAW shooting capabilities, a hotshoe for mounting external flashes or some branded Olympus accessories (such as a periscope style EVF attachment or GPS module) and to top it off a huge, bright f1.8-f2.5 zoom lens which even to date is one of the fastest zoom lenses you can get on a pocket camera.
It's not a pants pocket camera as the lens sticks out quite a bit. Additionally the lens has no built in dust/scratch shutter that folds over the lens when the camera is turned off so just like a mirrorless body or bridge camera you need to cover the lens with the provided lens cap or buy a third party folding cap that screws in the lens' accessory ring.
The XZ-1 has a 1/1.7 inch 10 megapixel CCD sensor. Before the advent of the 1" pocket camera sensor a 1/1.7 was one of the biggest sensors you could get on a compact camera and was the gold standard for premium point and shoot cameras like the Olympus XZ-1, Panasonic LX5 or the Canon Powershot S95.
As with many non Bayer CCD sensors the images taken with the camera have extremely high color saturation and contrast. This sensor did, however have pretty terrible dynamic range so it really struggles with shadows. It also struggles going above ISO 800 (but it is really clean up to that point). However in even lighting it can get some really great shots.
10mp was low in resolution at the time; however this was done to make the sensor a little less pixel dense and make the photosites slightly more sensitive (we see this in some modern cameras like the Sony A7S and Panasonic GH5S). It's still plenty of resolution for web posting with enough wiggle room to do small crops and still have decent web-sized photos.
I bought my first XZ-1 used in 2012 and at that time it was remarkable having about the relative image quality and controls of my first DSLR in such a small package. It was my first really solid pocket camera; up to that point any of my pocket cameras were pretty meh and if I wanted a photo that looked decent I had to lug out my DSLR.
The Olympus XZ-1 bridged this gap and put the joy into shooting pocket cameras for me. Since then I've had newer, better pocket cameras like the Panasonic LX100 (which broke), Sony RX100 (first generation) and my current 1" sensor does everything sidearm the Panasonic ZS100. In essence the XZ-1 was the grandfather to the Panasonic ZS100 that I now carry almost everywhere when the weather is pleasant. Its still a capable and fun to shoot camera under the right conditions.
The Olympus XZ-1 is quick and responsive, and gets really sharp high quality images just at a lower resolution then we're used to in the modern era. But for web sharing its more then enough.
The two biggest limiting factors for me is the limited 4x optical zoom and the inability to shoot above ISO 400-800 which is helped somewhat by its fast lens; meaning I can still use it indoors and get reasonable photos at lower ISO since the lens can let in more light.
I have a lot of fond memories shooting this camera a decade ago, and its still a joy to shoot to this day. It often becomes my pocket camera I carry during winter months when I don't want to risk losing something more expensive to a slip and fall or dropping it on the driveway because it fell out of my jacket pocket and later getting run over on the street (this happened with my first Panasonic ZS100. May it Rest in Pieces).
So with that, enjoy a few photos I took on the Olympus XZ-1 on the third week of Jan in 2023. A pocket camera that may be over a decade old but is still a really fun camera to shoot.
No comments:
Post a Comment