Until a review unit arrives at Olympus’ Spanish PR Office (amazingly just around the corner from my apartment) I’m slurping up anything and everything I can find on the web about the EP-1, or digital Pen camera. And it’s not just journalistic professionalism, either: As an amateur photographer, I’m excited by a camera that could actually deliver on the promise of a compact digicam which works as well as an old film compact.
Non-DSLR cameras have a few problems which make them a pain for anyone serious about their photos, and this is why I’m scouring the web: to find out if the Pen has solved them. And the answers so far appear to be yes, yes and yes.
First up is shutter lag. You’ll know it as the sluggish pause between hitting the button and the camera actually snapping a picture. One of the causes is the non-mechanical shutter. The Pen has a real (if quiet) clunk-click shutter. Reports say that shutter lag is all but unnoticeable.
The second problem with compacts is their tiny sensors. The Pen has a Micro Four Thirds sensor, half the size of a 35mm frame but still way bigger than those in even high-end compacts. And it seems that this sensor has low-light noise licked: Take a look at this shot, taken by Derrick Story. It’s a jpeg, straight from the camera, shot at ISO 6400. As Flickr commenter Swiss James says, “Sold.” Throw the image into Adobe Lightroom and add a few tweaks and you get a rather nice, grainy B&W version (below, thanks to Derrick for licensing his images under the Creative Commons).
The other problem is focussing. DSLRs use phase detection to focus very fast. Compacts (and DSLRs in live view mode) use contrast detection, which is a lot slower. The Pen uses this, too, prompting fears that it would be sluggish in use. Photographer James Duncan Davidson took it for a spin:
But what I can say is that autofocus speed is reasonable. It’s not as fast as the autofocus system on my D700 bodies, but it’s a heck of a lot faster than any compact camera I’ve used.
[M]anual focusing works like a charm. When you turn the focusing ring, the viewfinder zooms in letting you judge critical focus. You can move your zoomed view around the photo with the control pad if you’re not in the right place. And, the focus ring […] has a nice feel […] With a bit of practice full-on manual focus should be easy as pie, if you’re into that kind of thing.
That’s right. It has a manual focusing ring, although you still need to stare at the LCD to see if you have got it right. And if Olympus had actually included a depth-of-field scale on the lenses, you could easily use that to set and forget a hyperfocal distance, just like the street photographers of old.
Finally, there’s the problem of the viewfinder. Amongst other niggles, Canon’s G9 fails as a serious camera because the optical viewfinder is so small as to be unusable. The Pen gets around this by shipping a big-looking finder with the 17mm lens. Accessory finders are nothing new, but they are dead handy for fast framing and even the cheap old Soviet ones I have owned have been bright, big and sharp. So far, though, I have read nothing about this finder.
We’ll find out for sure when we get our hands on one (I’m in a race with Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney to see who can get one first). Until then, what I’m reading is making me more, not less, excited.
Olympus E-P1 ISO 6400 [Flickr/Derrick Story]
Quick Olympus E-P1 Hands On [Duncan Davidson]
New York City Shoot to Test the Olympus E-P1 DSLR [Digital Story]
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