Olympus's early Camedia compact — 1280x960 CCD, fixed 36mm-equiv f/2.8 lens, SmartMedia, 4x AA
The Olympus Camedia C-860L was an early consumer digital camera introduced in January 2000, sitting at the affordable end of the Camedia range. In North America the same body was sold as the D-360R, so both designations describe one camera.
It captured images at a maximum of 1280x960 pixels on a small CCD, through a fixed 5.5mm f/2.8 lens equivalent to 36mm, with only three aperture stops (f/2.8, f/5.6, f/11) and shutter speeds from 1/4 to 1/500 second. Files were written to SmartMedia cards in JPEG or TIFF, a 1.8-inch 61,000-pixel TFT LCD sat alongside an optical viewfinder, and power came from four AA batteries. A sliding cover protected the lens and housed the flash, rated to 3 metres.
Today the C-860L appeals to collectors of turn-of-the-millennium digicams and anyone chasing a low-resolution, early-CCD rendering for creative projects. The optical viewfinder and simple controls make it genuinely easy to shoot, but resolution is well below one megapixel-era smartphone output and low light is a struggle.
On the used market, SmartMedia is the main obstacle: cards are long discontinued, capped at small capacities, and readers are becoming scarce, so a working bundled card adds real value. Check the sliding lens cover mechanism, battery-bay contacts for alkaline corrosion, and confirm the LCD still displays without heavy bleed.