I bought this camera as a backup for my 7000i, which had taken a dip in saltwater and was a bit unstable. I remember a colleague of mine picking it up at taking a few pictures and noticing how light and small it was — and slow! He was a Nikon F5 man himself, so he was used to something completely different.

And yes, the 500i was a small and lightweight camera. And slow by the way. But I had bought it as an backup camera, and I armed it with a Minolta 28mm f2.8 with a polarizer most of the time, and it shot some swell images.

And I liked it. It was a pretty camera, nicely designed. It had plain buttons, a control wheel in front of the release button and some pretty sensible controls altogether.