Olympus C5050?

[TedJ]

ssra30,
You've got a nice site. I just checked it out.
TEdJ

 

[DiverG]

Ok, I did it. I'm a proud owner of a brand new Olympus C 5050 camera with a 2 year replacement warranty for all of $479 plus tax. Plus I just purchased my PT 015 from Newegg.com for $134 with free shipping.

For those that are thinking of purchasing one, I bought mine at CompUsa computer store in Houston, Tx. I'm sure I'll be back here asking lots of questions in the near future.

 

[MosheDyan]

on the OLY 5050Z.
As far as the CF card make your choice wisely to take advantage of that wonderful .RAW image capability you now have. Personally I use LEXAR JUMPSHOT 32X 1GB CF and am very pleased thus far. Approx 137 images (in .RAW mode) until full...and the 32X write speed means ~4 seconds.
Have fun...

 

[lovells19]

hey, congrats on purchasing a really great camera,

oly c5050 is one of the most prefered non SLR digital camera,(in my region)

i owe one too and is having great fun with it.. and do attend the digital workshop if they do provide. you'll learn a lot more when someone actually explain to you the functions and oly's specification features.

im using both XD 32mb (comes with the cam, 27 in HQ and 2 in Raw) and also a transcend 512mb 45x cf card(419shots in HQ, 69 in raw).

i do notice that XD card writes faster, well they are from olympus, and therefore naturally it should write faster, as its the prefered medium by olympus when they design the camera.
but so far my cf card has no problems with my shots and write reasonably fast enough, sometime we cannot blame the medium which the camera writes on.. but rather the camera's processors itself which sometime determine the writing speed.

When i attended the work shop. someone asked if they could activate flash when in super marco, the reply well was no.
at distance that close, the internal flash will cast a shadow or make the subject too bright.

i keep my flash on when im in SM mode.. but you need a difuser to make a well exposed picture.
set mode to AF or Marco mode, then set flash to slave, then go to superM, then you would be able to activate the flash.

do hope my long boring mesg helps. have fun with the camera

 

[flima]

I swap the xD card with CF card in the camera, but when I turn it on I get nothing on the display (stays dark), and LCD has a number '81' blinking all the time.
This CF card was one I used in the past with another digital camera.
Any ideas what the problem is ?!

Also another question .... does it work if I have both cards inserted in the camera at the same time ?!

Thanks,

- Fred

 

[Scubatooth]

this week while playing with my 5050 is did some tests on the memory flush times.

as for the XD cards being faster, that may be correct for the cheaper end cards, but this is because the Xd cards use a raid 0 style set up, while this is good for write speed, but if something goes wrong with the memory the whole card is shot.

heres a breakdown of manufactures and speeds. testing was done with the following lexar 128 mb 12x(claimed) ridata 512mb 40x , and supplied 32mb XD card. the files shot were RAW, tiff, and SHQ all set to max resoultion (native, non interploted resolution of 2560x1920).

i wont go into to many details because it would be 3+ pages

but heres a general run down, lexar 128 mb card was the slowest, but only by .5 of a second compared to the XD, will the Ridata card was done in half the time that the XD card took to download. so realisitically the XD cards are about as fast as mid priced lexar, while the ridata just runs circles around them

and for who asked right about now its 260 for a 1GB, 130ish for a 512, and 65 for a 256 from my digital discount (these would be Ridata CF cards)



heres the link about cards speed and quality
http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=42197

Memory info/data:
as for brands of memory there are really only 2 producers of flash mamory that is used in these formats, and they are Toshiba, and Ritek(aka Ridata). beyond this the chips are bought and resold to other companiees who put there label on them. Alot of the time you can tell the quality of the chips based on price (but not always) the better quality and faster chips(cards will always be a little more expensive). the brand that i use exclusivly is Ridata CF cards as they are some if not hte fastest CF cards onthe market(they are faster then the buffer on most cameras, so that i can keep firing away and not have to wait on the card to finish).

The thing alot of people look for in memory cards is the lowest price they can get them for but low price doesnt aslways get the better cards, its sort of like film; good film(velva, or kodachrome) cost money and will produce good results, as were cheaper films(kodak royal) will have mixed results. As having done alot of digital photography and used cards on a daily bases so as not to drag a laptop around i knopw which cards work and which dont cut it.

heres the ranking of cards from best to not so good(please note that this is from personal opinon and testing)

Top 3
1. Ridata: fastest cards on the market, and well worth the price, the lifetime warrenty is great and is no questions asked, though i havent had to use it.

2. Lexar (very good, but a little bit behind Ridata, also the WA technology that is in some of the upper level cards only works on certain cameras, ie Pro DSLR's) Lexar is also the company that makes cards that come with the camera initially, but not always(those cards are like 4x speed)

3. Transend: these cards are made by toshiba under the transend label, are quick and fast and price resaonable well, just not widely stocked in many stores

Middle of the road
*Sony: the read write speeds arent all that good and over priced for what you get, the pro sticks are faster but only marginally

*Microtech: second runs of transend cards

Bottom
*Sandisk: are notoriious for using the cheapest chips as possible and charging a premium, even the ultra cards a slow compared to the low end of the top 3s cards. also have a high occurance of DOA or sudden death. also sandisk has the worst record to date on fufilling rebates. ( i have 2 that died 1 week after buying them, 1 was supplied with the camera,and the other was free when i bought the card, sandisk refused to replace them, and i wont use them again)

*Viking: are second runs of sandisk, and normally always have some sort of rebate through amazon(which are almost as bad as Sandisk in getting them fufilled).

YMMV

Scubatooth

 

[DiverG]

ssra30 once bubbled...
Hmm, don't know about the size limit on CF card on the Oly 5050. Personally I use a 1 GB card with no problem. I think I did come across something about older C5050 with older firmware version, -75 or earlier may have problem with card bigger than 256mb or something like that.

Has anyone else come across this? My owners manual on pg 49(specs pg) list the different media cards and the size cards that I can use. For all the formats it lists various sizes up to 128mb.

 

[Mike Newman]

lragsac once bubbled...
I can't speak to the price issue on the camera, but re the CF vs. the xD card, I would purchase at least a 256 CF card. But do hang on to the xD card as I believe if you ever want to shoot in panorama mode (where you patch together the frames) you need to use the xD card. Someone pls feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this...

Ragsac is absolutely correct - if you are relying on Olympus's own-brand photo editing software to create panoramas. There are other common packages out there that will take most overlapping photos (overlap about one third of each part of your panorama and try to maintain a level traverse) and produce a good result.

I have used the Olympus software - and it works really well -

One more word of caution though - you have to set the camera in Panorama mode to take advantage of the Olympus software feature! Well, they didn't say it was straightforward, did they?

 

[lovells19]

where you using it with another brand of camera?

you can try formatting the CF card before use.