Olympus C200Zoom

The Olympus C200 Zoom was a 3 megapixel camera I bought in 2002.

It cost a fortune, around 400 in today's money.

It had a small display, a couple of buttons and a very slow zoom motor.

It was essentially a point and shoot model that was switched on by pulling the lens cover to the side.

It ran on four AA batteries and the pictures were stored on a SmartMedia card. I had one small 8Mb card, and a big one with 64Mb.

It took nice pictures, although the resolution was not up to today's standards, and it was very slow in everything it did. That was one thing that surprised me the most. I expected a digital camera to be better than a film camera in every respect, but I was so wrong.

While my old film camera snapped pictures the moment I pressed the button, the very expensive digital one had a one to two second delay. But one cannot go against the progress, I guess.

Those early cameras certainly were slow compared to their film counterparts.

One of the most surprising things was the gap between pressing the button and the photo actually being captured (called the 'lag')

On some cameras the lag was so great I personally saw photographers turn grey while waiting (or maybe it was the worry of the photo industry?!)

Fortunately things have changed and now digital cameras, especially digital SLRs have improved to such an extent that the time lag is non-existent.

Thanks for the submission,

Darrell.