can i get an opinion on this purchase?

[themadness]

i found this camera on craigslist today.......

olympus digital camera

Olympus CAMEDIA C-5060 WIDE ZOOM

does anyone know anything about it? it came out several years ago, but seems to be a decent camera to have as a spare. its only 5mp but that doesnt really matter much. it seemed to be top of the line in 2003 and sold for around 500 dollars. would it make a decent goof around camera for 50 bucks??

[jdepould]

Don't know about the 5060, but here's a 5050 review:
Olympus C-5050 Zoom Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review

[OsmosisStudios]

I wouldnt bother. For $30 you can get a brand new canon A series. Most compacts arent worth reselling unless they're still brand new

[mattdm]

I had that camera and loved it. I bought it for $600, even. It's really a very nice, especially when paired with a flash like the FL-36 (which would also serve you well if you later upgrade to an Olympus dSLR or PEN). My younger brother still has it and uses it happily.

In many situations, it'll take better pictures than a brand-new budget camera. In fact, on another forum, I recently saw a complaint about how modern P&S cameras have not improved on image quality since the Olympus "C" series. Since it was a high-end camera, it has a lot of great features like several different saved-settings memories (you can have it remember things like what focal length to zoom to at power on!) and pixel-mapping to remove any dead pixels on the sensor. And it has much higher-quality glass than budget P&S cameras will have now -- unlike high-tech components, good glass doesn't get cheaper to make every year.

The main failing will be in low-light (if I remember right, ISO goes from 80 up to 400), but a hot-shoe flash is a fine investment and will take care of that better than ISO 3200 would. Oh, and it's also kind of slow. (If you shoot in RAW mode, it takes like half a minute to save each shot!)

So $50 seems like a fair deal to me, but it really is also worth budgeting another $200 for the flash in the near future (which, as I said, will work fine on a modern Olympus PEN or dSLR, and won't loose much resale value).