[Leica] Olympus XA (OT)

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

Reading early releases on Sony's forthcoming ultrapremium-priced non-SLR 
non-interchangeable, non-zoom-lens finderless full-frame digicam, the RX1, I 
couldn't help but think about its nearest film equivalent, and one of my 
favorite past cameras, the little Oly XA. I'll bet a lot of LUGgers past a 
certain age used this little gem. How many of you still have yours? Use it? 
When I think about it, it just annoys me that this new, smallest FF digicam 
is twice the depth and box volume of the XA, and not pocketable. And that 
the smallest "serious" digicam, the Sony RX100, is the same size as the XA 
and yet can't manage a sensor that's more than one-third the dimensions of 
the XA's frame.

[For those too young to have seen one, I'll describe it as the size of a 
pack of cigarettes (remember that antiquated comparison?), rugged plastic 
construction, sliding door covering the integral 35mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens, 
rangefinder focusing with a lever on the bottom of the lens, aperture 
selected with a vertically sliding tab on the front of the body, and 
aperture-priority autoexposure?with the shutter speed indicated by a needle 
in the viewfinder. But you had to set the ASA yourself. Powered by a watch 
battery in a recess in the bottom, and it takes a screw-on flash unit on one 
end if you need it. And it took full-frame 35mm pictures. The camera's 
almost exactly the same size as my Sony RX100, which has a collapsible 
pancake 3x zoom lens and is a few mm shorter?but which has a sensor that's 
about 35% of the linear dimensions of a 35mm frame and about 14% of the 
area. I started wondering where mine was and when I had used it last?must 
have been 10 years. I got it over 30 years ago when I was stationed with the 
USAF in Wiesbaden, Germany, and so many of my fellow members of the 
Wiesbaden American Ski Club got one too that it became the "official" trip 
camera of WASKI. Then, I came across it yesterday quite by accident while 
searching for something else somewhere entirely different. Serendipity. No 
film in it, unfortunately, but the battery still powers it up. So it's off 
to Walgreen's we go...]

So I'm thinking, if anyone other than LUGgers would be willing to accept a 
non-zoom, integral-lens manual-focus camera with no built-in flash, in 
return for maximum pocketability, how small could a FF digicam be? Why can't 
it be the size of the XA and even include a RF? Obviously it would need a 
lot of electronics that the XA doesn't, but then the XA has all that space 
in the film cassette and takeup-reel chambers for circuitry and a big 
battery. The need to have light rays strike the sensor at as steep an angle 
as possible apparently imposes certain constraints on lens design, and 
therefore size, but then a FF CMOS sensor is so sensitive that you could 
obviously settle for an f/4 lens, as is the case with FF DLSRs with typical 
zooms, and maybe correct for the light fall-off far from the axis in 
software, which should loosen the constraints. The Sony RX1 is a step in 
this direction but the body is about 1 cm larger in height and width than 
the RX100, and the big lens gives the camera twice the depth?without being 
interchangeable, or a zoom, or f/1.4.

I'm just sayin'.

?howard