Olympus E400 - what sort of results could I expect?

[osbourne one-nil]

I've got on order an Astrotrac, which I'm going to be using in conjunction with my TV85 and Olympus E400. My E400 is old, very heavily used, and its Compact Flash port is broken meaning I can inly use the XD card port. Other than that it's in fine working order.

I've just got the two kit lenses with it - a 14-42mm (28-84mm 35mm equivalent) f3.5-5.6 and a 40-150mm (80-300mm equivalent) f4.0-5.6.

I'm not looking to get masterpieces with this kit, but just some satisfying results that can give my son and I hope for the future. Do you think I'll be able to achieve something with the camera and lenses, bearing in mind they're relatively slow and the camera isn't the most up to date?

Also, does anyone know how long an exposure a 2GB XD card would hold, or how to work it out?!

[Psychobilly]

The length of the exposure will have little or no bearing on the size of a still image.

I would do some dark test with the camera to see how it performs noise wise with exposure length and ISO setting...

I will dig out the user manual for the camera and get back to you...

I downlaoded the PDF version of the manual from here

http://www.biofos.com/esystem/_img/e400/e400bman.pdf

The features that you might want to look at are manual mode shooting in bulb mode using the IR remote (p39-42) Manual Focus (p43) Raw mode (p46) and Noise Reduction (55)

Peter...

[osbourne one-nil]

Ah, I don't suppose it would...good point! I have noticed it takes an age to write to the XD card though.

Here's some noctilucent clouds I captured using it a couple of years back which perhaps gives some clues?

[osbourne one-nil]

And here's a 60sec exposure at f3.5 and ISO1600. Does this give any clues?

Looks ok to me considering it's ISO1600 - and perhaps that's all that counts? It's a subjective thing, after all.

Can you tell I'm trying to convince myself?!

[Psychobilly]

If you have the NR turned on then at some point the camera will start taking "auto darks" so there will be a gap betwen each light exposure thats slightly longer than the exposure length (dark exposure of the same length + processing time + data write to card)

If the noise characteristics of a camera change significantly between exposures then this wil give the best results as each light will aheva fairly closely matched "auto dark" applied to it...

There's a sequence of "sunjective" tests that I perform with every DSLR that I can get my hands...

This involves taking sequences of darks (with NR turned off) at various exposure , ISO settigns and gaps between the exposures... Thsi lets me get a feel for how the noise changes as the camera sensor heats up...

Peter...

[osbourne one-nil]

Thanks Peter...so I do have something to work with you think? Quite happy to learn and improve as I go along.

[Psychobilly]

Yes you will have something to work with...

I'lll try and dig out some notes on the test method I used or their might even be a forum post from several years ago ... If not I will knock something up for you to try... If you have a couple of batteries it will be worth having them all charged up ready

Peter...

[osbourne one-nil]

Thank you - I'll have a good search. As for the batteries, I do have two....years of doing landscape assessments in remote places taught me the benefit of that! I do sometimes I'd just stuck with Canon though....so much more choice there. They seem to be running the four-thirds range down and concentrate on the micro four-thirds.

I do have a Canon G11!