Throwback Thursday: Olympus C-3040 Zoom

Produced decent enough pics, but ate batteries at a terrifying rate, was very slow to use and thanks to Smartmedia had a similar capacity to a roll of film. And the viewfinder was scarcely approximate, even.
And absurdly expensive.

Before the C-3040 was the 2000Z, my first digital camera. I loved that thing: small, retro design, nice pictures. I later upgraded to the C-5050Z. Hard to use, incomprehensible menus.

My first digital camera!

i had the C-2040 only 2.1MP and the recording was slow but the optics were very good.

My first digital camera was the C3000Z, released in 1999. It was so exciting to be able to take shots and look at them right away. It came with an 8MB card that held 20 shots. Woo!

Yeah, yeah. The image quality was surprisingly good for a digital camera that came out 17 years ago - at least as long as I didn't try to take a shot of something that was moving. I ended up using it for nearly a decade and still have it. Somewhere.

The Olympus C4000Z was my first digital camera. 4 megapixels and came out in 2002. what wonderful memories.

An Olympus C5050 was my second digital camera and although it had some faults it was a colossal improvement on my Nikon 990 Coolpix, which was a very poor piece of equipment. The C5050 (based on the C3040 in this feature), had a very fast, sharp lens and a viewfinder that was more accurate than my later Canon G cameras. Build quality was pretty good and I hoped that Olympus would progressively upgrade this line, but it never happened. Unfortunately, there is now a sizeable gap between phones and SLRs, with few products delivering affordable quality in this area and nothing that uses handy AA batteries.

This was my first digital camera and I got my moneys worth out of it. I bought a Tiffen zoom & wide angle teleconverter that screwed on to the body via a tube I believe. Looking back, it's hard to believe how much it cost for the specs compared to modern DSLR's. I bought the Olympus E-10 before moving over to Canon.

This was the camera that started it all for me. Sure I owned cameras before this one, but I splashed out on this when I had to build a website for a wedding dress designer. I was expected to do the photography too, and foolishly I thought "how hard can it be?". That's where the journey began. As I learned, I outgrew this camera and moved onto an Olympus E1 - still probably the most satisfying camera I've ever owned (yes I know how dated it is, but it was simple and, at the time, impressive).

Looks like my GA645.

Good looking camera and the stills have held up really well!

Very interesting, these 16 year old images hold up well against some current camera images. Yet, some of us continue to justify re-placing our current gear whenever the latest technology becomes irresistible. Is that what separates a professional from an enthusiast with their toys? Not to my credit, I fall into the latter category.

The C3030Z was my first digital camera, and my first "serious camera." Prior to that, I had really cheap plastic toy-quality camera as a kid, and never really did much with them except taking random photos for fun and some reference photos for artworks. The C3030Z was my decision to get serious about photography.

I can't say I learned much about photography with the camera, because it really wasn't all that friendly to manual operation, and the lack of DOF control was also very limiting, not to mention the terrible high ISO performance, low dynamic range, slow AF, etc. I was already a professional visual artist at the time, so my instinct for composition was already developed, and using that camera didn't develop it any further.

I soon outgrew the camera and felt frustrated by its limitations. That's when I decided to get a Canon 1D Mark II. Everything changed for me as a photographer after the upgrade, and I really started learning the important lessons in photography.

This was my first digital camera. Soon after buying it I sold my Canon EOS100 film camera and lenses as Canon seemed to have no interest in making a DSLR.

I'd waited a while before going digital. The key feature was the quality had become good enough, and sufficient resolution to be able to fill a 1280x1024 monitor even after cropping. The C3040Z made great images, and it had loads of features, apart from the size and non-changeable lens, it competed well with the Canon I had.

However, the shutter was laggy, like most cameras of their day, which meant you needed to be an expert in anticipation. After quite a few years of good service, I replaced it with a Canon A710IS, because I'd bought my wife a Canon Ixus 710, and it was so much quicker to operate.
The Olympus was still going strong, and I gave it away to a friend who really wanted to go digital but had no money, and since she mainly wanted to do still lifes, landscapes etc, the shutter lag didn't matter too much to her.

As you can see from the third that features red and a ferrari I believe, certainly travelling past the shutter at at least 25mph (I suspect rather more!) prefocussed as this was through the window on the grasses, shutter lag is very small, as I waited until I could just see the red that corresponded to the noise I could hear before pressing the shutter button.

I've uploaded 2 to My Gallery, for a change, so you can see what I mean. You can do better, as you can shoot TIFFs that have no sharpening and then apply it in software afterward. 3 megapixels gives a good A3. The G1 Canon was as good for colour-better than any of its sucessors in fact, but the CCDs Nikon and Olympus were then using have greater contrast, the lack of which in CMOS still plagues Mankind today.

What cost Olympus the maket was their adoption of cards noone else uses-SmarMedia in this case, very pleased and surprised Windows 10 can still read them!! Then they went all XD, why? Nobody else did, like Sony with their MS pro, tut, tut!

I still have my 3030, and of course it still works perfectly as these machines predate the Lead-Free Solder RoHS directives of 2002. I rather coveted its dinkyness and its superb wide-angle macro facilities, and the accuracy of its colour today is better than many contemporary machines, plus it can do a few frames a second and well, to be honest, although the screen on the back is small the fact that it is isolated and projects forward out of the back concentrates the mind-eye combo wonderfully. People forget that all these very expensive machines were equipped with eyesight correction in their viewfinders already, making them more easily useable that almost all film SLRs, but with this one you really have to position your eye just right as it isn't exactly accurate or stable- any movement and you but up against the round blackness of the dreaded optical tunnel. Still takes a nice snap-.

I had C5050Z and used it during winter time in Winnipeg. We'd experienced -40 degrees that time. This camera is pretty good and still with me. However it's already in my dry cabinet for a very long time :(

Thanks for posting this camera it's really a good one.

Had the C2040Z which was my first digital camera

Never had this one.. At that time I had 2020 and later switched to E-20 .

I start to make digital pictures in 2000. I remember to wait for a 3MB camera, so the Oly 3030z was my first digital and then the race begin to many systems.
OLY 5050, 8080, Canon EOS 20, 7D, Lumix GH2, GH3, GM-5, GX8 and owned for a while some Sony RX100 II and III. (thanks ebay for sell and resell :))
And.... when I'am review my pictures from the early years, the results was already good. There is much more technical interest, then the need for a new camera.
Of course, in low lights , speed an performance there is a big improvement.
So I'm looking forward for the next technical highlights and enjoy the hobby.

It's beautiful.

I remember being a shop clerk selling these. I did not as much appreciate the concept of digital cameras that first year. The IQ was below asking price and the lethargic zoom of this model left a lot to ask for. The first consumer demand for these was real estate, who asked for faster online possibility. Soon after the realization that digital was the way to go the shop saw an immediate decline in returning customers, as everything was one stop shop, competing with the growing trend to do business via internet. I myself opted for Olympus E-20, which hasn't seen it's like ever again.

The 3040 was my first digital camera. I still have it but haven't used it in years, and I still like many images I got with it. But there's no comparison to today's gear.

The Olympus C1400 was the first digital camera I ever used, at work. It was a real privilege to 'get a go' and have a chance to marvel at its stunning[ly bad] 1.4MP images, not least because the battery died after 20 minutes ;-) This C-3040 looks like luxury in comparison.

My first digital camera, cost me $1200 Can., but it was worth it. The flexibility over film and the shockingly sharp close-up images were really impressive for the time. Only drawback then versus now was that it was hard to manually focus owing to the resolution of the LCD.

I was given one of these when a friend had bought a new camera. I thought it was very nice at the time. I only really remember using it at an outdoor BBC Radio event 1 week before 9/11 to photograph Kylie Minogue in Leicester.

I still have the C-2040. Great camera with the 1.8 lens. Moved up the C-5050, which I still have. C-5050 has features I still never used. They both served as console cameras when I switched To Nikon.

My first digital camera, an amazing machine, for splendid pictures ! Thank you Olympus...I'm not sure to be more happy now !

2001 was the year I bought my first real digital camera and mostly gave up on film. It was a Kodak DC4800. IIRC, I picked it for the 3:2 aspect ratio and 28mm wide angle. Nice camera for the time.

Dis-A-Pointment!!!
Where's the C-2100 throwback???
It's a true icon that I still use regularly.

If I recall correctly, the C-3040 blocked infrared, just like today's cameras. However, the C-2000 and C-2020 did not, making them dual-purpose cameras. Had a lot of fun with those.

Just for the kicks... I'd like to see how does one of these cameras perform against a modern, let's say... D810 with a 105mm 1.4 . :-)

The C-3040 was my first digital camera. I loved it for the overall image quality, colors and the fast lens. I used it quite a bit for landscape photos and taking pictures for ebay listings. In good light, it produced very good images and still does. The biggest negative for me was it's speed. It was slow to focus and power up and down.

I have owned several other cameras over the years, but I still own the C-3040. My wife uses it for ebay pictures. It genreally works great for ebay pictures. 3mp is more than enough for ebay listings.

I owned the C-5050. Man, I loved that thing!