The Olympus XA series of cameras has a serious following...and well they should. The XA was a real breakthrough in terms of size/quality. The XA sports a great 35mm lens in a package you could drop in your pocket. Unfortunately, the 2 cameras that came in my box were XA-2s. Same great lens, same great package...minus the rangefinder focusing mechanism. See Camerapedia for more background.
Minus the rangefinder focusing mechanism, pretty much sums up my problems with this camera. It's got a nice feel to it. Love the electronic shutter release...nice little "click" when it goes off. I've seen a great many sharp images from XA cameras, so I know the lens is good. Problem is, I'm just not so good at zone focusing. If you've never heard of zone focusing...it's basically guessing at the distance and setting the camera. The XA-2 has 3 symbols on the focusing slider, one for close, one for medium and one for distant focus. You move the slider wherever you think is best and shoot.
As scary as zone focusing sounds, under some circumstances, it's quite easy. Load up fast film, stay in full daylight and the depth of field of a stopped down wide angle lens will cover a great deal of inaccurate distance guessing. Unfortunately, I don't shoot like that very often.
On to some shooting results.
I loaded a roll of Tri-X and set the iso to 800. I knew I'd be shooting in lower light situations, and I wanted to max the depth of field. Great theory. In reality, more often than not, guessing at the distance proved too much of a challenge.
When I managed the focus, the camera did its part very well. See the next few shots.
Under more challenging situations, I failed miserably. This was the closest I got to an in focus shot of my kid...out of 5 efforts! (I suck)
So, nice camera. I see what folks like about the form factor, but for my uses, I'd need the XA and the ability to focus on something better than intuition.
Great camera, I ditched mine for a MJU II just so I could shoot whatever the weather, get one, they are the king of P&S!
Posted by: BennehBoy | February 03, 2011 at 10:44 PM
Nice shots steve, i love the first one.
Yeah i have the same problems with my XA2. I just can't get the zone focus down, mine usually look like your last one.
- james
Posted by: James Jay | February 04, 2011 at 09:06 AM