Throwback Thursday: the Olympus C-2100UZ

I too bought one on clearance at Walmart for around $400. I sold it eventually, but always kinda regretted it. Then a couple of years ago I found one on Amazon in their Warehouse deals section. The listing described the condition as "Acceptable", the price was $20 with good'ol prime shipping. Well, " Acceptable " turned out to mean Like-New, Mint condition with the original box, charger, remote control, manuals, warranty card and Camedia Software CD. SCORE!!! Also included was a 64mb Smart Media card. Trying to resist the urge to sell it to help finance my camera addiction and because I hardly even look at it, let alone use it.

I have had 4 since it's release and paid over $1000 and bought it at Wal*Mart. I've had a lot of cameras since then but I always seem to find one and go back to it. I won all of my photo contests entries with it and came in second in the Olympus America Contest. I've had better ergonomics and less noise with other cameras but I still love the Oly UZ. I've always had a slight tremor and this was the best camera to eliminate my camera shake.

I still have and use mine - great camera !!!

Just saw this. The "UZI" was my first digital camera. I bought it in early 2002 at the old Circuit City for $480. I ended up selling it to a co-worker a couple years later and moving to a Panasonic FZ camera with 4 or 5 MP and snappier performance. That lens was amazing at the time.

Heidi and I have these. We've each taken many thousands of photos with ours back in the day. And the forums here had lots of great discussions on these back then. They took much better photos than you would expect from their meager 2MP. The IS was great. I'm glad most cameras have IS now. I also have a few external battery packs for mine.

These days we take most of our photos with our Android phones, because we always have them with us.

For current cameras, I have a high zoom pocket camera, and a waterproof medium zoom pocket camera. Heidi now has a DSLR with a high zoom lens, and a high zoom pocket camera. All our current cameras have IS.

We learned a lot with the old UZI's.

I have had one since 2001, my first digital camera. Not using it anymore these days because of its limited capacity, especially for video. It's just outdated, which I hate.
During the days of slr film cameras, your dark room and your budget for lenses and most of all your skill and creativity made the difference, not the built-in obsolescence.

Even if Hollywood goes Iphone, I want the weight of a cemara in my hand, and the rings on the lens to adjust exposure and zoom.

Progress must serve people.

Ah, my first digital! Loved that camera. I took thousands of shots with it and it really helped me improve. The optics were great. Thrift store item now that I paid close to a grand for in 2001! Worth every penny.

I traded in a new Nikon Cp 990 for this, and never looked back.

I almost didn't buy this camera because I felt the Phil Askey review a bit lukewarm, but for $400.00 on the Walmart sale table, I took the chance. I am so glad I did because I would rate this this best camera I ever owned for it's time. (I have had them all-TLR's, Nikon F, DSLRs, compacts, etc.

I just happened to have the Olympus 1.7 tc from a film camera and this made for an amazing wildlife set up. Easy control layout, stabilized, fast lens, quiet and lightweight.

No raw, no problem. For some reason this camera could really nail the exposure and white balance. Not to mention great Olympus color.

I became worried that mine would break, so I bought another off of Ebay. Have bought several cameras since hoping they would be the modern "Uzi". Closest was Olympus Stylus 1, but not quite the magic

At 2mp, most people considered it obsolete at the time until they saw the photos.
Maybe I should get it out since most of my photos are only viewed on Instagram and 2mp would be plenty.

The "Uzi" was my first camera ever, bought two days before a holiday for a total of 1500 EUR (camera + accessories). Obviously that was too little time to learn, so the first days gave me a pretty mixed shooting experience ...

The lens was amazing, and so was the heat in the grip and the accu consumption. SmartMedia cards were expensive, and if you were going to shoot in-camera panoramas you had to purchase an original Olympus SmartMedia card which AFAIR was almost twice the normal price.

The only other 2100UZ I ever saw belonged to a young man in Helsingborg whom I convinced to swap cameras for a moment and shoot portraits of each other. The word and idea "selfie" was completely unknown to me at this time ... :)

It was a good companion until 2006 when I replaced it with my first DSLR. The rubber grip piece had almost fallen off, it was full of scratches, but the rest was ok. So I gave it away for free to a parish's youth group were it was welcome for children's photo workshops.

I still have one of these. I keep some eneloop batteries charged in it all the time to keep it working, though I don't really use it much these days. Was an incredible camera in it's day though and got me on a more serious track with my photography.

Those were the days when camera makers only make a small handful of models per year and took the time to test them thoroughly. Mass defects were incredibly rare then. Today we're used as beta testers as they toss stuff out weekly and use the customer to find the device glitches after-the-fact.

A good man did me a great favor in 2002 by insisting I borrow his 2100UZ. My daughter was just one week old and I had very little interest in a digital camera, preferring to use my film Nikons to photograph the new baby.
Well, I used it to take about 50 pictures of my daughter which are of course priceless to me now. In order to try out the IS and other features I took photos I probably would have missed with the film cameras I had then.
Yes, the pictures were only 2MP but the detail and color were exceptionally good and over the years I've made nice prints of several shots and included some in a Blurb book.
It was a very nice camera.

The UZI was the camera I took in my unforgettable voyage to the Galapagos Islands. It was a joy to use. Even in the years to come, using Canon and Olympus equipment, to the present EM1-MkII, I still go back now and then to the Galapagos UZI pictures and view them with pleasure!

I loved my UZI. It was the first digital camera I sold photos from. The newspaper liked my photos on line and gave me a press pass to film rehearsals for the Cue section of the paper. That bought my 1.7X adapter and the macro adapter Oly made. But of which are still usable on my micro four thirds cameras with step up rings. Moderate pixel peeping shows a little softness at 100%. But they still are as sharper or sharper than the kit lens on the Pana 25 f/1.7. Not at all bad for 10 years old. The UZI still works as long as I avoid high contrast. The CA is atrocious by today's standards. It was my second digital camera. But I took thousands of photos with it. 2 or 3 thousand still online today. The main thing in that day was that it was fun. When I got married and gave it to my wife, I missed it as the new camera was better but did not have the fun factor. My wife still takes it out to shot sometimes as she likes the Oly jpegs from it more than her new camera.

Was and still is a great little camera. I still have my UZI and my 15fps E100RS as well as my C2020Z and a waterproof case for it. All still work perfectly and take great images... Olympus was breaking new ground. The E100RS would start taking images and cycle them in and out of RAM untill you pressed the shutter so you could get amazing frames such as the moment of impact when a major league pitcher's over-the-plate fastball was sent into left-field by a dead on hit at the plate. The UZI would let you zoom in on the action and get great wildlife shots with its stabilized zoom lens. Great products IMHO...

I had [actually still have] the earlier C2500L. Looking back at that it has the actual [not 35mm equivalent] zoom range on the barrel. I know it was 3x - probably about 30-90 equivalent. Lots of shortcomings - only 2 f stops , quickly got noisy and the zoom lever on mine is now kaput [the remote zoom still works - or at least it did the five years or so since I last tried it.

For all that I did love it at the time - it was a 'real' SLR even if you were stuck with one lens. For the same money a few years later I got the Nikon D70 which brought the shortcomings - and the build quality - of the Olympus into sharp relief. I got some good shots out of it though and that's the important thing.

Oh man! I had one of these and absolutely LOVED my fast-shooting "Uzi"! That constant 2.8 lens was a huge boon to my early digital experience and like another user said, the photos could be blown up to 8x10 pretty nicely. The only thing I didn't like was a tendency in mixed lighting to render blacks as purple, a phenomenon I also recall from Leica's early digital cameras. I sold mine to a coworker who wanted to shoot his kids' soccer games. I'd bought a Canon D30 and 70-200 to start my push into "real" digital photography, but I later regretted selling my "Uzi." Still do. It was a cool camera.

I shot a lot of 2mp pics in those days and printed 8x10s ,the quality is surprisingly good and sharp when I see them so I believe the only important change these days is not the MP count but the various new technologies in the sensor expecially BSI.

We had two of these 2100's for several years and they were great cameras. The lens was made by Canon and was sharp! Still have a bunch of photos from it that people never know was taken with an older 2 megapixel camera. One of our favorites and never had a problem with it.

Yes, my first real digital camera. I bought it because of the great reviews and b/c people were having so much fun with it. That truly was the case; it was a fun camera! Fond memories of my entry into digital.

One of the earliest digital cameras I bought at a discounted rock bottom price when it was at an end of line sale. The reasons I bought it were good DPR review, 4xAA batteries powered, good zoom range, stabilized image, cheap memory card (cheapest of all five commonly available choices: CF,MS,XD,SD and MMC), and EVF. I still have it and use it occasionally when batteries of other cameras are dead, although it is slow in respond in today standard. As far as I am concerned, this camera can be used at any time as it is AA batteries powered.

My first serious digital camera. I loved it and the results I got from it. It became very popular and for a short time there was a run on them on EBay. Prices skyrocketed without any good explanation. Then things got back to normal. Always wondered why. Have had multiple digital cameras since, but the Uzi was special.

My first digital camera ever. I absolutely loved this camera and was spoiled by its stabilization, and really great lens for a superzoom. Moved on to the first gen Canon Rebel, and spent quite a bit of time adjusting to not having stabilization. Spent many a long lunch at work in downtown San Diego just snapping photos with this guy. I still have it, and it still works.

Lol there is a lab here that still uses one of these because it can be mounted to the top of a microscope tube for taking pictures of cell histology

The Uzi was my first digital camera, and I loved it. Sold all my Pentax film camera equipment to buy it. A great and versatile digicam!

It sure wasn't pretty but it got the job done. The stabilized long zoom lens was a huge bonus, too.