You could say it’s what’s missing from this camera that now makes it a rarity.
The C-400 was the base-level model of three cameras that marked the entry by Olympus into the consumer digital era
in 1996.
They were the first Camedia cameras.
The others were the higher-spec C-400L and the C-800L – the L indicating the presence of an LCD screen.
The C-400 had no screen and a tiny 1mb of internal memory. My guess is that consumers asked themselves “What’s the point of digital if you don’t have a screen?” They gave this orphan a wide berth. Hence not many have survived to become “one of the rarest and first compact digital cameras ever built”, as described by one collector.
Nevertheless, the C-400 produced excellent photographs, with its fast f/2.8 lens and 0.35 megapixel sensor. It’s just that you wouldn’t know that till you’d got your prints back from the photo lab.
David Leith © 2023