So I got this camera while thrifting the other day–an Olympus C-3000 Zoom from the year 2000! I think I will forever leave the price tag on the body. Sadly though the memory card (a smart media) was like $30 for 32MB! One dollar per Megabyte. Yes kids, 1 MB won’t even store a full res jpeg/heif from a modern cell phone. This camera shoots TIFF files as well! But on this little card you can store only 3. That’s a pretty challenging thing if you wanted to limit yourself to just 3 images a day. I’ll have to wait until I get a USB cable or smart media card reader to see if the pictures have a digital lo fi vintage quality though.
Olympus C-3000 sitting on one of my all time favorite photo books: Laetitia Casta. She was at the tail end of the super model era of the 90’s, and might have been the most gorgeous, fitting for any age, from then to the Renaissance days
To put things in perspective, my first digital camera came with an 8MB card, and before that we had the Apple Quicktakes and Sony Mavicas that wrote to floppies. Nowadays you can walk into Micro Center and get a 64GB SD card for a few dollars. Crazy!
Olympus C-3000 with some other neat finds I got: Return of the Street Fighter, Bloodsport, and Hard Target–all on VHS, and a Dragonlance paperback. I’m still looking for the rest of the trilogy but they are hard to find because they are now collectible. Who knew?
Olympus C-3000 on top of my other great finds, old issues of The Savage Sword of Conan–for $2 each! That’s a bargain. I loved (and still do) these comic magazines as a kid. The black and white art on the inside is amazing, and the painted covers just scream adventure campaign like a D&D boxed set. What’s crazy is these comics came out in the late 70s at a price point of $1.50. A normal comic was only like $.35 back in the day. This is kinda like the $7.99-8.99 issues of Vogue that we have in 2025…
This camera is one of many 3.3 Megapixels cameras from that era, when they started to get pretty good in image quality. It takes 4 AA batteries, which is great!
In photographing all my various gear I get to appreciate the product design of every single item. Things look quite unique when they are off on their own. Cameras can also elevate the outfits that you wear.
This type of memory card is wafer thin and very finnicky. You have to insert it a few times if the camera gives you a Format error. Takes a long time to store images too.
Why even bother with a digital camera this old? Why not? It’s a piece of history, from a different age. To be so clunky with the media and operational quirks, it actually came from a time that was much simpler from a society and life standpoint. I guess that’s why old folks hunt down toys and memorabilia from their youth. Cameras, comics, and movies is pretty much the stuff that defined me.
(All product shots taken with the Nikon V1 and 18.5mm)
