Hasta La Gadget!

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]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Smart, Retro Olympus E-P1
• Retro-Styled Olympus Camera Photos Leaked
• Olympus Camera Packs SLR Aspirations in Compact Body
• Olympus Digital Pen And Pancake Lens Teardown

The last few years have been a huge boom for toy cameras in Japan, tapping into both retro trends and the embedded camera culture of the country. Two companies are leading the charge: Lomography (the original reviver of plastic camera goodness) and Superheadz (the Japanese equivalent with its own offerings).

Last week was the 25th anniversary of the LOMO LC-A, the Russian model that started it all, with a surprisingly fun party at the Tokyo Lomography “Embassy”.

I was planning to go, but missed out on the party and am wishing I’d made it. As an avid user of my favorite Holga, Horizon, and Blackbird Fly cameras, it’s been great seeing this culture catch on among 20-somethings in Japan. Digital camera makers, by the way, could learn a lot from what’s going on here, especially from a fashion/design perspective.

Poor Pentax. The company puts out great cameras, but they suffer from an image problem. A public image problem. Pentax makes the sensible but dull cameras none of the cool kids want. Which is a shame as the new Optio W80 is a camera that only the cool kids will need.

The 12 megapixel W80 is rugged, with a capital arrrrr. Cold-proof (14ºF), waterproof (16 feet) and drop-proof (three feet), it is designed for outdoor and sporty use, and the features are cleverly tuned to this purpose. Auto-macro and auto-ISO shift (up to 6400, although the pixel count then drops to 5MP) are dead handy for shooting underwater. Face detecting auto-focus and shake reduction help, too (the anti-shake is actually done at the processor level instead of using a moving sensor). And the ability to shoot two hours of HD video underwater is surely a winner.

In fact, the only thing that doesn’t seem to fit the outdoor lifestyle is the LCD screen. Pentax tells us that it is “large”, but 2.5″, although fine, is not “large” anymore. And the 230,000 dot-count looks a little low (and a little fuzzy) in these days of 900,000+ pixel screens.

Then there are the gimmicks, some good and some just, well, gimmicky. An AF assist lamp is certainly useful and the Digital Wide mode stitches two pictures together to make a snap from the equivalent of a 21mm lens (the real zoom range is 28-140mm, 35mm equivalent). Less important is the Decorative Frame mode which can put some frilly edges on your extreme gliding pictures. The very best part though is the name of Pentax’s PC software: ACDSee. Genius.

The W80 will cost $300, and looks to be a very capable camera, wrapped in a tough body. The trouble is… well, look at it. That’s camera design circa 1982, and not in a good way.

Product page [Pentax. Thanks, Martin!]

We cover a lot of new cameras here at Gadget Lab, and if you go right out and buy them, often you’ll find you can’t actually do much with the pictures (unless the camera shoots JPEG only, in which case this is not the post you’re looking for. Move along). Manufacturers’ software is almost uniformly execrable (even Nikon’s Capture NX2, which gives great results, is real pain to use).

So it falls to the third party software to update regularly to play nice with new cameras. This pretty much means Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom and Camera Raw software. It’s Lightroom’s turn today, and it adds support for a huge amount of new cameras. 31 of them, in fact, and although most of those are Hasselblads, the Canon EOS 500D and Nikon D5000 sneak in, along with the latest Sony DSLRs (A230, A330 and A380) and the Panasonic DMC-GH1.

This last is accompanied by an interesting snipe at Panasonic fix for the kind of shenanigans carried out by Panasonic with the Lumix LX3. The LX3 uses some tricksy software to fix the large amount of distortion from its wideangle lens. These algorithms are applied to the RAW file in-camera, which is a big no-no for RAW.  To address these kind of shenanigans.  This is applied to either the in-camera jpeg or, for the RAW file, on the computer. Adobe has updated to DNG spec to allow this kind of heavy processing to be done on powerful computers rather than weakling camera chips, and should mean that in future camera makers can add these corrections directly to the DNG interpretations rather than Adobe needing to work with everyone individually. The tools are called Opcode Lists:

This also allows processing steps to be specified, such as lens corrections, which ideally
should be performed on the image data after it has been demosaiced, while still retaining the
advantages of a raw mosaic data format.

Sadly, this still relies on camera makers to make these algorithms and processes open instead of squirreling them away as some kind of “intellectual property”, something that Panasonic has done, working with Adobe to make sure that Camera Raw and Lightroom users get the picture they should be getting. Hopefully this trend will continue, and allow access to these deep parts of the cameras’ hearts which remain locked away unless you use the manufacturers’ own software. Tell me. You have spent your money on a camera. Who should control what is done to the pictures by that camera. You, or Canon or Nikon?

Post updated upon receiving new information from Adobe. The original title to this post was “Adobe Lightroom Updated, New DNG Spec Takes Shot at Panasonic.”

Lightroom 2.4 and Camera Raw 5.4 Now Available [Lightroom Journal]

Digital Negative (DNG) Specification [PDF. Adobe]

One of the biggest surprises in the week or so since the the iPhone 3GS shipped is the camera. It is far better than anyone was expecting, far better than a 50% increase in pixel-count would suggest. A look around the internet turns up some rather nice photos, and some rather enthusiastic testimonies.

“With focus control like this, it’s hard to believe it’s just a cameraphone. Tap-to-focus is how all cameras ought to work from now on,” says Dave Shea, aka Mezzoblue, who took the photo above.

That focus control is one of the reasons the camera has improved so much. Autofocus lenses don’t have to be sharp front to back. This means that there is less of a compromise between flexibility and quality, and the lens can be designed to be sharper. And any focusing, auto or manual, means that you can achieve a shallower depth of field for differential focus and blurred backgrounds. That the iPhone also has touch-to-focus control is just gravy.

But this isn’t the real reason that the iPhone poses a threat to the standalone point’n’shoot camera. The 3GS is “just good enough” for most people to take good everyday pictures. And remember the much repeated saying that the best camera is the one you have with you. Combine these, and even the experienced shooter might think twice about buying a compact to supplement their DSLR. Again, for most shots, the new 3GS will be good enough.

Now it has a decent camera, the iPhone solves another problem for many users. Sharing. You or I might be photo junkies, happy to spend hours tweaking our pictures to upload and share, but most people take the snaps and that’s it. My mother stopped using her new digicam because the memory card is full. With the iPhone, though, sharing is easy — you can do it direct from the phone, right now, wherever you are. This alone could be the killer app for many people. Nobody prints photos anymore, and few upload anything. With the Polaroid dead, the iPhone is the instant camera to replace it. In fact, maybe Apple should add a shake-to-upload feature?

And one more thing. Video. This was the other thing the first two iPhones lacked, and a good reason for buying a compact camera. But with a compact camera, video is even harder to share than photos. Not so with the iPhone. “Capturing, trimming, and sharing video with the new iPhone 3G S is literally a snap,” says Derrick Story” on his photography blog, “After a bit of testing, the easiest way to share is directly from the device itself.”

Story is an experienced photographer and video podcaster, and even he says that it’s easier to upload video from the iPhone than from a computer.

There are of course many things the iPhone camera doesn’t do. It doesn’t have a flash (although low-light pictures and video look surprisingly good), it has no optical zoom and it doesn’t have a dozen auto modes. But that is missing the point, and the point is that the 3GS camera is deliberately limited, but what it does do, it does well enough to make you leave your camera at home.

Photo: Mezzoblue/Flickr