Still great after all these years.

elliottnewcomb wrote:

Never knew about it, but that is a nice bright lens for that much zoom power. Cool looking too.

What did it cost back then?

It depends. New it was over $1k. However many of us got it when Olympus had a fire sale and dumped it at CompUSA (remember them?) in the US and perhaps other stores abroad for $500.  At the time, Olympus needed to raise some cash and the world had moved on to 3 megapixel cameras.

However, in terms of image quality, while it only had 2 megapixels, those megapixels were sharp, and the C-2100UZ (or UZI as we called it) often times came out with better pictures than the 3 megapixel cameras that succeeded it.  I printed up many 8x10" images with the UZI.  The trick was to frame the shot in the camera, because you had zero room for cropping (other than to trim the edges to adjust the aspect ratio).

While I still have mine, and keep it charged, I haven't shot with it in over a year. I think the last time I took it out, the pictures were corrupted, so the smart media cards may be failing.

That being said, I have 10,564 shots with it in my albums (23.12%) since I got it in 2002.  Most of the shots were in 2002-2004, with usage tapering off after I got the E-1 and later DSRL/mirrorless cameras.

Once I had gone to multiple cameras, the UZI had a nice niche due to the 10x zoom for a vacation camera.  One of the reasons I got the Stylus-1 was that it was a more modern version of the UZI, fixing the one problem I had with it.  The problem was the camera started at 38mm equivalent field of view, and that is just too long for many indoor shots where you can't back up.

One other thing that the UZI had going for it was the Olympus forum back in the day was a lot more fun.  Back then we weren't into deep diving into specs comparison or zooming in 100% to look at pictures of brick walls, but it was more of a community that shared our pictures and experiences.