The Beast

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was browsing through the Salvation Army store and found an old digital camera. It was in fact an Olympus D 600L one of the first digital single lens reflex cameras ever made. Now old technology is just that old, so there isn't going to be any hue and cry about a discarded first generation one megapixel camera, but I can't leave well enough alone, I had to have it.

I justified this by saying that I wanted gears and brightwork for a Steampunk thingy I had in mind and if nothing else I could tear the thing aprat and use all of the innards for my project. To make matters worse they only wanted a dollar. Now how could I possibly refuse to buy if all it cost was a dollar? I would spend that on, well let's just say that my doctor would not approve of what I could spend a dollar on and leave it at that.

So I bought the old girl, without ever being able to juice it up I know not a great choice, but then there's the dollar part again so I took it home and cleaned it up and reloaded it with fresh Duracells.

(Don't listen to what Consumer Review or the Internet says about batteries. Buy Duracells. I started using them way back in the Sixties when they were still called Mallory Duracells, they had a copper top then too but not the advertising budget that the other companies had. They got most of their customers from word of mouth from working photographers who had to have a battery they could count on 100 percent of the time and that was Duracell. That hasn't changed in the last fifty years, when it comes to batteries, Duracells last, deliver and are there when you need them.)

Once the Beast had power it fired up and low and behold it could still take pictures.

Not that it got much help from me, I took pictures when it clearly said don't do it and in most cases it was right, I shouldn't have done it, but then I've never been able to tell my elbow from a hot rock and through the magic of digital if you take a bad picture you can just erase it and move on.

So here is the only shot from the first batch I kept, but I think you'll agree there is nothing at all wrong with this camera that a better photographer couldn't fix.

Not at all bad for a dollar!