[Leica] Olympus XA (OT)

[richard at richardmanphoto.com (Richard Man)]

The XA was my first camera out of school. I still have it. The rewind crank
broke so a few years ago, I bought another one, just because

As I said earlier, I think the RX-1 is too little, too late, but if they
make a digital full frame XA, I will buy it, for up to 2012 $1500.


On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Howard Ritter <hlritter at bex.net> wrote:

> Reading early releases on Sony's forthcoming ultrapremium-priced non-SLR
> non-interchangeable, non-zoom-lens finderless full-frame digicam, the RX1,
> I couldn't help but think about its nearest film equivalent, and one of my
> favorite past cameras, the little Oly XA. I'll bet a lot of LUGgers past a
> certain age used this little gem. How many of you still have yours? Use it?
> When I think about it, it just annoys me that this new, smallest FF digicam
> is twice the depth and box volume of the XA, and not pocketable. And that
> the smallest "serious" digicam, the Sony RX100, is the same size as the XA
> and yet can't manage a sensor that's more than one-third the dimensions of
> the XA's frame.
>
> [For those too young to have seen one, I'll describe it as the size of a
> pack of cigarettes (remember that antiquated comparison?), rugged plastic
> construction, sliding door covering the integral 35mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens,
> rangefinder focusing with a lever on the bottom of the lens, aperture
> selected with a vertically sliding tab on the front of the body, and
> aperture-priority autoexposure?with the shutter speed indicated by a needle
> in the viewfinder. But you had to set the ASA yourself. Powered by a watch
> battery in a recess in the bottom, and it takes a screw-on flash unit on
> one end if you need it. And it took full-frame 35mm pictures. The camera's
> almost exactly the same size as my Sony RX100, which has a collapsible
> pancake 3x zoom lens and is a few mm shorter?but which has a sensor that's
> about 35% of the linear dimensions of a 35mm frame and about 14% of the
> area. I started wondering where mine was and when I had used it last?must
> have been 10 years. I got it over 30 years ago when I was stationed with
> the USAF in Wiesbaden, Germany, and so many of my fellow members of the
> Wiesbaden American Ski Club got one too that it became the "official" trip
> camera of WASKI. Then, I came across it yesterday quite by accident while
> searching for something else somewhere entirely different. Serendipity. No
> film in it, unfortunately, but the battery still powers it up. So it's off
> to Walgreen's we go...]
>
> So I'm thinking, if anyone other than LUGgers would be willing to accept a
> non-zoom, integral-lens manual-focus camera with no built-in flash, in
> return for maximum pocketability, how small could a FF digicam be? Why
> can't it be the size of the XA and even include a RF? Obviously it would
> need a lot of electronics that the XA doesn't, but then the XA has all that
> space in the film cassette and takeup-reel chambers for circuitry and a big
> battery. The need to have light rays strike the sensor at as steep an angle
> as possible apparently imposes certain constraints on lens design, and
> therefore size, but then a FF CMOS sensor is so sensitive that you could
> obviously settle for an f/4 lens, as is the case with FF DLSRs with typical
> zooms, and maybe correct for the light fall-off far from the axis in
> software, which should loosen the constraints. The Sony RX1 is a step in
> this direction but the body is about 1 cm larger in height and width than
> the RX100, and the big lens gives the camera twice the depth?without being
> interchangeable, or a zoom, or f/1.4.
>
> I'm just sayin'.
>
> ?howard
>
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-- 
// richard <http://www.richardmanphoto.com>