Olympus C-840L (1998)

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The camera was announced by Olympus on 1998-03-17. It could record 10 frames in a 5 second sequence. Olympus was among the few camera manufactures which could make a digital camera look like a 35mm film camera. They were also the only ones that would supply a memory card with enhanced functions on them like the famous panorama feature. The card included in the package was 8MB which was enormous, most manufacturers did not supply cards and if they did, it usually was 4MB or less. Olympus had listened to consumers that were complaining about the colour management and dramatically improved it for this camera, hence this camera was given the newest optics available. Also the time to store images on the card had been reduced from 13 seconds to only 7 by using new algorithms. As I said Olympus provided a panorama function embedded on the memory card but also offered three other functions:

 

- Calendar Card for creating a unique calendar
- Template Card had templates to combine images into original greeting cards
- Handwriting Title Card laid handwritten notes or drawings on a digital image

 

Apart from that it featured everything one would expect from an early Olympus digital camera. So I may repeat myself here but from all the 450+ vintage digital cameras I have seen and handled, I can honestly say that Olympus digital cameras were the among the best point-and-shoot digital cameras one could have in 1997 and 1998. Hands down.