The #ShittyCameraChallenge and the Olympus Camedia C-3030, 05 July 2023

The #ShittyCameraChallenge and the Olympus Camedia C-3030, 05 July 2023

Much to my better judgement I ordered a couple of shitty cameras recently. One was an Olympus Camedia C-3030, a 3,3MP wonder released in January 2000. Apparently it has some muck in the battery chamber and won't connect to USB. However, it does work (and that's the main thing). It uses SmartMedia cards and the package includes a couple of these. Fortunately I have a card reader that will read SmartMedia cards.

The camera along with a couple of others, a Ferrania Elioflex pseudo TLR and an Agfa Clack with a fungus-ridden lens, arrived this morning. The Olympus was in better shape than I thought, and I couldn't really see any corrosion in the battery chamber. Perhaps they had cleaned it a little first, thank you,  Kamerastore. 

The pack of cables included the original USB cable, a power cable and a serial/audio jack cable, which I have no idea how I might use. It also contained a nicely boxed 16MB SmartMedia card, and there was another in the camera, so I was good to go.

When I installed fresh rechargeable batteries the camera powered up straight away, albeit with a slight grinding noise. 

A couple of shots through the window showed a lovely little image on the screen, with natural colours and a nice sharpness. Emboldened with this success I fixed the camera to a mini tripod, grabbed my colour filters and headed out. 

Across the road from the house is my favourite tree and well that I use to test any new camera. I took a couple of pictures of the tree then took red, green and blue colour filtered images. I haven't figured out how to change the profile to monochrome so I just held the filters over the lens. I also took a photo with the Hoya 720nm Infrared filter for good measure. 

I couldn't really see any of the images on the little LCD screen when I was outside, but back in the house I loved what I had got, especially the infrared image. The colours were amazing, with very pale purple vegetation and deep red skies. I made a trichrome from the colour filter images and a (not very good) digital aerochrome with the infrared image. 

All in all it's a lovely little camera and will definitely be taken out again. I was toying with the idea of making it full-spectrum, but the infrared image was so lovely I'm just going to leave it as it is.

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