Dealing with a Dimpled Prism

The printing is not the wrong way round. this picture was taken in a mirror…

I’ve bought another camera. This happens. I think my camera buying hobby is now slightly cheaper than golf. Although I don’t know how much golf costs. Anyhoo, I went full-on brave for this one, I ordered it from Japan. For some reason the most interesting second hand buys are coming from there. You have to be careful about import duty and whatnot, so they are not quite the bargains that they appear when you first see them. However, I thought it was worth the risk. The seller had 100% feedback and seemed to have sold a lot of stuff so I took the plunge.

The camera arrived last week. Above is a crop from the first picture I took with it. If you look carefully you can see some dimples in top part of the camera. These weren’t on the pictures attached to the listing. There were some marks on the box that indicated damage during transit. At first I decided to live with them as a natural consequence of having something posted half way around the world. But then I decided that since I’d paid for a non-dimpled prism I might as well see if I can get one. I raised the issue with the supplier and they just said “OK, we’ll send you another one without dimples”. Amazing stuff. Very pleased. If you are thinking of buying a camera from Japan I can recommend them. You can find them here.

Ancient Pictures

The battery arrived for my Panasonic Leica camera and so we took it out for a walk yesterday. The pictures turned out rather well. The resolution is not great, but colours look pretty good. I was looking back through some of the pictures I took a few years ago and they are around the same resolution (4 megapixels or so) so it turns out that size isn’t everything. The camera is great to use. It has an optical viewfinder that zooms in along when the main lens, which is rather impressive. Performance in low light is pretty appalling but it does have a flash.

There are lots of buttons and dials on the back

The only thing I really don’t like is the way they’ve used “soft touch” plastic around the viewfinder. Over the years this has turned into “sticky touch” plastic that is rather horrible. But I think I can live with that. I’m going to see what other kinds of pictures it can take.

A digital Leica of my own

I’ve always fancied owning a digital Leica camera. Like I fancy owning a Porsche. But different. Anyhoo, a while back I discovered the Leica Diglux 1, which was produced in conjunction with Panasonic in the early days of digital photography. It looked really cool, but I couldn’t really afford one of those either. Then I discovered that as part of the joint development Panasonic actually made their own version. So I managed to find one at a price I could afford. When it arrived I took a brief look at it, discovered that the battery was broken and popped it in the loft.

Today I found it again and took a proper look. It has a very rare feature for a camera like this. You can plug in a mains adapter and power it directly. I did this and it worked fine. So I’ve ordered a battery. I’m not going to get super high resolution pictures from it, but I’d love to have a proper go.