Thread: Olympus XZ-1 for $199.99 at Amazon

It all depends on how much you value having the latest and greatest, but overall the improvements are pretty small: slightly better controls, slightly better sensor, new grip, same lens, touch sensitive display, etc.

I don't think the improvements will be worth the 3x cost for most people.

honestly, unless you're an obsessive pixel peeper, I would say the difference is FAR from being worth 3x the price. Some people need to be on the bleeding edge. When the XZ-1 come out a year or so ago it was in amongst the best in class. You can't go wrong.

My wife yesterday by email: "Hey we need a new camera at work for les than $500. We need it for taking pictures of speakers during talks, general shots of the city, etc. Any suggestions?"

Thanks for the advice, I think I'll spring for this after all!

My wife lost her old Canon P&S and the flash on her beloved Pentax Optio I-10 has ceased to function. Guess what she's getting for Xmas? She actually uses her camera a lot and, to be honest, with the Q and E-PM1, I won't be using the XZ-1.

I still love my XZ-1 and I reckon anybody could benefit from having one in the bag. Not even interested in XZ-2.

The XZ-1 came in today. I'm charging it now to snap a few to make sure all is well. Very similar in size to the E-PM1, but of course the XZ-1 has a really nice lens that would be quite a bit bigger for mu43.

It was just too good a deal to pass up. Here's a couple of shots at iso 100 and 800. Color at 800, if even reasonably exposed, looks good to me. Both images were developed from raw into 16 bit tiffs, and then worked from there. I don't like the jpeg engine in it, but I usually shoot raw anyway, so it's not really an issue. Each was given a slight additional high pass sharpening in photoshop, but that is how I treat almost all my images from any camera. At 100 iso, the camera can give stunningly good results for its class, I think.