Snapshot Camera Part II
Looking back at my review of the Nikon Coolpix L-20 I have to say I was quite proud of that camera when I first purchased it. Regretfully, that pride of product failed me within six months when it simply stopped working, consistently acting like the batteries were dying even after installing brand-new alkaline cells. To say I was miffed would be an understatement. I was so upset that I didn’t bother to send it in for repair (despite still under warranty) and didn’t buy a replacement for another six months or more.
But I did buy a replacement which has, so far, held up to more than half a year riding in a pouch at my hip in hot weather and cold and still looks good doing it. In fact, I liked my replacement camera so much I bought my wife the same model in pink (she’s the local chairperson for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life fundraising group.) Mine? It’s blue.
What is it? I went back to the brand I’ve used the longest and seen the best reliability from: Olympus. I’ll grant that my first Oly digital camera didn’t last long, but that was my fault as I spilled a soda on the front and it got so sticky that it clogged and eventually broke a number of microswitches operated by the plastic lens cover. Oh, the cover protected the lens just fine and the camera was still usable until the switches broke, but the repair would have cost more than I paid for the camera. But that wasn’t my first Olympus.
My first Olympus was–and is–a metal-bodied OM-2 film SLR (single lens reflex) dating back to 1978 when I purchased it. I’d looked at Canon and Nikon back then and they seemed overpriced and had both more and fewer features than I wanted at the time. The OM-2 was an aperture-priority auto-exposure camera (meaning you set the size of the lens opening and it set the shutter speed) with fully-manual capability. I loved it and used it as my primary camera for over 20 years. If you check some of my photos on Foxtrot Photographics (www.foxtrotphotographics.com) and Facebook, they were taken with that old camera. I don’t do film any more but I would absolutely love to have a full-size digital back made for it or one of those April Fool’s joke products that let you put a digital filmstrip in place of the old film roll. I’d go back to using that camera in a second if they did.
But that’s not telling you what I have now, and that’s the Olympus Stylus Tough 6020. It’s built to withstand being dropped to a concrete sidewalk from normal picture-taking height and able to take pictures even underwater up to about 15 feet deep–your average swimming pool depth. The instructions even say that the easiest way to clean it is to dip it in a bowl of room-temperature water and just swish it around a bit–sure would have helped when I spilled that soda on my first digital Oly. It takes remarkably good pictures and is fairly easy to use without having to do a lot of menu-diving like some brands. Then again, most digitals today can take decent pictures, but not all of them are as easy to use as they should be; even now there are people who refuse to go digital because they’re not simply Point & Shoot in the sense that the old Kodak Instamatic and similar film cameras were. That’s not to say the Stylus Tough doesn’t have more features than those, but it can still be as simple to use for most people.
And that’s why I like it–it’s simple enough to turn on and snap a quickie and yet complex enough to offer a decent photo in difficult conditions. When it comes to riding in my Jeep, the Tough might just survive the wilds better than the Nikon L-20 did.
Related posts:
