ionosphere

Posts Tagged ‘Olympus E20N’

Last Wednesday evening my Olympus Camera was returned to me from DigiTech Camera Repair in Monrovia, California. This digital camera had been down for a long time but I had it under a stack of papers next to the drawing board here in the basement. I’d taken good care of it and had picked it up maybe a month and a half ago thinking that it was a pity that it didn’t work as it was in excellent condition physi­cally. It had performed well through it’s warranty period and even through an extended 3 year warranty with Mack Camera. I just couldn’t bring myself to tossing it in the trash. Have you seen that show called “Hoarders” on the Discovery Channel? I’m not quite that bad but I guess I do possess some of those traits…

It was during our trip to Cape May that the camera that I’d bought as a replacement to my original clicked to a sudden halt with a broken shutter. (same type) because I’d purchased all the acces­sories initially. The camera had been purchased to allow me to continue shooting for my graphic design work and illus­tration after the first Olympus E-20N stopped working abruptly with the addition of a couple 2 gigabyte Compact Flash Cards. It just stopped cold. Until I got the info from DigiTech I had no idea why…

I should preface this by saying that multiple attempts were made to get the Olympus fixed by the people who made it. No dice. Not even an answer.

Suddenly dead in the water and knowing that the older rather beat up Olympus wasn’t worth repairing… I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. I certainly am not in a position where I can go out and choose the camera of my dreams right now… and I was pretty much out of luck. I looked over Olympus’ site again and see them clearly state that they no longer support the camera. So I started looking online. Remembering that this used replacement was also found online — I hesitantly searched for someone that might be able to look at my camera. I didn’t really have much hope of it actually being repaired — but I wondered. The cost of a new digital SLR is out of reach right now and with family events approaching — I needed a solution. Google Search was my answer.

One shop was apolo­getic saying that Olympus doesn’t have any info available on the camera any longer and they couldn’t even get parts. Some didn’t answer my query at all. DigiTech Camera Repair got back to me quickly with a more than fair price, so off it went for service. The used camera must have had something very inter­esting happen to it. It has a fine chalky material in all of it’s seams and believe it or not — even inside the lens. I’m not really sure how someone goes about ripping the rubber grip off the camera body? — They did here. Let it suffice to say that I’m glad I wasn’t there. Lens shown below.

When I saw an email titled “Olympus E-20N” from DigiTech I winced a little. Expecting the worst, I opened it and was pleas­antly surprised…

John had dropped me a note to let me know that my camera was ready. Not only was it ready but he had done the work more quickly than I’d expected. Most impor­tantly John held to his estimate. Exactly. So with his work, John let me have a camera to use again and in the process converted a couple of pounds of scrap metal into a contributing member of society. I immedi­ately set about testing using my family as subjects and those shots are shown below and above.

The problem with the camera was that the electrical circuitry was shot. John repaired that and then noticed that the camera couldn’t recognize a memory card. So it seems as if the memory cards that I intro­duced were the downfall of the camera. They shorted out the card writing circuitry and in turn the main circuit as well. I use one of those big honker Lithium Polymer LIPO batteries that sits where a power drive film advancement system would have been on a tradi­tional film camera. So I don’t have tons of megapixels to spare but I’ll get my shot and it will work fine for me without running out of memory or battery power. I appre­ciate John’s work and there are links to DigiTech in this article and in the side widget area. My images follow.  There you go… a happy ending for a change.

Good to go… Thanks John !!!

Got an excellent bit of news by email on Saturday afternoon

My digital camera that died/fried several years back is coming home.  It went to California and a week later here it comes. Very reasonable price and a fast turnaround. The power circuit and the card writing circuitry were blown. The fellow who did the work was in Monrovia, California and I’d guess that I’ll have the camera back later this week. I’m surely thrilled by this turn of events and I’ll post links to the guy’s business as soon as I have the device in my hands and see it working again for myself.  I didn’t think that it was going to be good news when I saw that note — but I was very pleas­antly surprised.

I’ll let you know how it goes and graph­i­cally demon­strate the results. Been without an SLR since Cape May and I miss it. Which also reminds me that I should post a gallery of Cape May Victorians so that the “replacement” camera can have death with dignity.

Yes. The Olympus E-20N that I bought back years ago in New Jersey has been sent for resurrection.

It stopped working several years ago — just as I upgraded to bigger and better Compact Flash Memory cards. There I was already to go shooting with absolutely no worry of  running out of storage space while shooting and damn if the camera didn’t just go to sleep on me. Matters were made worse when I wrote to Olympus USA on Long Island and didn’t even get a response as to where I could take my now out of warranty camera for service. So I went searching and found a company in California that I will certainly talk up a lot if they can just get my original digital working again.

The shot above was one of the last sessions with the Olympus prior to it freezing up.

In the interim period I purchased a used and rather beat up E-20N from a well known online retailer. It was sold as being in “mint” condition. It was functional but somehow the rubber padding on the camera that covered the body where you held it — had been ripped away and replaced with a black rubber or asphalt-like material that I’d swear was “coaxseal” — something that I used to keep moisture out of my connectors and junctions in coaxial cable commu­ni­ca­tions settings. Each time that I went shooting — the gunk would come off on my hands and small pieces of it would fall onto my shirts and mark them. Others using the camera also noticed the same thing as when they used it they would also have to wipe their hands clean afterward. Apparently the vendor’s idea of mint condition meant covered with gum?

When Sue and I were down in Cape May, NJ earlier this month I shot dawn coming through the window and the beautiful golden light went immedi­ately to black on my second shot that morning. It was the click of death for that shutter and you could no longer even look through the viewfinder. It was just black. So — since that was the second camera with such intense body coating trouble… I decided to see if there was anyone out there who felt that they could take on the challenge of repairing a digital camera that Olympus themselves no longer support in any way. It arrived in California last Friday morning and the fellow doing the work notified me by email that he’d received it and would let me know when the repair was complete.

I hope that Olympus America knows that they are building ill will by not even giving a repeat buyer so much as a simple answer about repair. I was thrilled back when I bought this camera and it’s acces­sories and just so sad when it ceased to exist. I took very good care of the equipment and never intro­duced it to a hard shock of any sort — extreme temper­a­tures of hot or cold… and I never got it wet. Failure of the camera was purely an internal wear issue and quite likely electrical in nature rather than a mechanical problem. When it comes back I’ll let you all know what it cost, who did the work, and just what the problem seemed to be.

I can’t wait for it’s return. Many images to make. Reference to gather. Time exposures to make… ya know?

For the past few weeks prior to Christmas — I’d been working on five drawings of the grand­children of Mr. Robert Leffler, my father-in-law out in Tucson, Arizona. We’d even gotten in touch with La Paloma Art Gallery in Tucson so that mats would be cut and waiting when we got there. You just can’t transport art properly on the airlines. If we’d framed them the glass would need replacing at the very least. Stuff gets tossed around. Sue bought two heavy plastic frames and and we nested and taped them together with the drawings carefully placed in a tracing pad between the two. From there, they would be my carry-on luggage along with my camera, extra memory cards and a battery charger.

Initially we were set to fly on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Turned out that our flight from PHL on US Airways was canceled due to a shortage of flight crew. So Sue went to work resched­uling from this to that… and back again. It wasn’t too much fun. We got up at about 2:45 AM and I brewed the coffee. We left in the dark. It was rainy. The night before I’d finally cleared a snow drift and plow in with the VW Beetle and the driver’s side window regulator broke in the pouring rain. Murphy’s Law. So — Trash bags were taped over the window and the rain stayed out. Thank goodness we were taking the van to the airport. We parked and dragged all the luggage into the United terminal at PHL. Two connecting flights and we were finally in Tucson.

The entire reason for our going West was to attend and document Mr. Leffler’s 80^th Birthday Celebration that was held on the afternoon of Saturday, December 27, 2009. Good thing that I had the art and the camera because our luggage was nowhere to be seen. The morning of the party — Sue, the girls, Lauren and myself all had to go shopping at 7:30 AM or so — otherwise… I’d have been in the same t-shirt and jeans that I traveled in. As would all of the group that departed from Philly. So — We had clothes. Late Sunday night, the day after the party, they found our bags and brought them to the house in Tucson. You pay $20 each for 4 bags from point A to point B and they lose them. Will we be compen­sated by the airlines for the loss of the bags and needing to go buy clothes? Who knows?

The first thing that I did on return was to jump onto the computer here to “process” the Olympus Raw Format “ORF” files in Photoshop CS3 Extended and convert them into uncom­pressed Tiff Images (2.26 Gigabytes). Then I made full size Jpegs, half size Jpegs and quarter size Jpegs and burned all materials onto a data DVD and onto 3 CD-Roms for distri­b­ution and safekeeping. As of yesterday afternoon all were ready to ship. That’s good. In case the extended family is inter­ested in them — I’ll pop them into a NextGen Gallery and post them here very soon. For now I have to work on a website.

The VW Beetle is now in the shop to fix that broken window that I mentioned and the parts won’t be in until Friday. So I’ll be right here working I suppose. Lots to do. Got to go change over the laundry and get another load of wash in. I’ll be back and corre­sponding again soon — but nose to the grind­stone on that website for now.

Sue and I spent the day in Tyler Park drawing in our sketch­books

just about the end of May. It was a great day and quite warm as I recall. I took a bunch of pictures that day — some of which I’d really like to go back and draw and paint from. I’m putting together a NextGen Gallery of those images and I think that they’ll work with the CoolIris viewer.