Olympus E-P1 (silver, body only)

Photos: Olympus E-P1

Looking only a bit like the original Micro Four Thirds concept design Olympus floated last September at Photokina, the company's retro interchangeable lens E-P1 debuts this year to ride the coattails of the 50th anniversary of the company's PEN film camera. From the name, to the design, to the tagline etched on its top--"Olympus PEN since 1959"--it feels like a cross between an homage and a desperate reminder that Olympus was in the camera biz long before most digital photographers were born. That said, the design works, though the company sacrificed some important features to implement it, and the photo quality should satisfy anyone shopping in its price class. Unfortunately, the E-P1's performance fails to live up to the promise of the rest of the camera. Still, the overall shooting experience is probably good enough to deliver Olympus a nice-size niche among style-, but not budget-conscious, enthusiasts.

Though they all include a full set of manual and semimanual exposure modes and other advanced features, Panasonic and Olympus have taken very different approaches to their Micro Four Thirds products, implicitly appealing to two diverse types of shooters. While Panasonic seems to be going for the technologically focused dSLR shooter looking for a more compact model, Olympus seems to be targeting the more aesthetically driven enthusiast who wants--and is willing to pay for--the flexibility of an interchangeable lens system in the more compact design of models like the Canon PowerShot G and Panasonic Lumix LX series. That explains some of the features Olympus sacrifices, including a viewfinder--electronic or otherwise--as well as on-camera flash. Olympus is offering an optional, low-profile hot-shoe flash and a hot-shoe direct viewfinder with the 17mm pancake lens. Though it offers miniHDMI out, it doesn't have a mic input or headphone jack for video as the GH1 does. If those are deal-breaking capabilities for you, you may want to wait for Olympus' subsequent products in the E-P line, though who knows when they'll appear.

Though it's retro from the front, in back it's all digital, with a pretty typical control layout. Along the right side of the LCD run AF and AE lock buttons, playback, delete, and menu. To their right sits a user-definable function button, which you can assign to invoke face detection mode, provide a depth-of-field preview, set manual white balance, reset the AF area to its home position, use manual focus, override raw settings, take an unsaved test picture, pull up MyMode custom settings, toggle the LCD backlight or disable the button entirely. As we've seen with other Olympus models, this method of setting the manual white balance is confusing, especially the first time; unless you know to program the function button for it first, you'll never figure out how to set the manual white balance. A back dial includes direct-access buttons for ISO sensitivity, white balance, focus mode and drive mode. There's also a vertical subdial; the combination of the two dials is nice, and both feel relatively responsive and comfortable to operate.

The prettily inset mode dial atop the left side of the camera offers the standard manual and semimanual PASM modes, plus movie capture, a variety of scene modes, intelligent auto and access to the 6 Art Filters. Next to the shutter is a dedicated exposure-compensation button.

An info button at the bottom right cycles through a lot of (some might say too many) display choices: a two-axis digital level, detailed current settings, basic settings plus a histogram or AF area, selectable thumbnail previews of exposure or white-balance compensation, scale/grid display or image only. You can also pull up Olympus' typical Super Control Panel, an overstuffed display where you can adjust most frequently needed shooting settings plus some not-so-frequently used ones, like white-balance compensation, sharpness, contrast, saturation, gradation, black and white filter and Picture Tone. There's a much more useful simplified version in which you cycle around the outer edge of the display to adjust shutter speed, aperture, white balance, drive mode, image stabilization mode, aspect ratio, image size and quality, flash options, ISO sensitivity, metering, autofocus, face detection, and AF target (auto using all 11 AF areas or user selectable).

For such a compact model, the 14-42mm (28mm-84mm equivalent) kit lens can be pretty sharp. It does a lot better at macro distances--and can focus pretty close--than at traditional ones, however. Overall, it delivers about the same shooting experience as the 18-55mm lenses from Canon and Nikon, with the exception of manual focus. Though the manual focus rings on those lenses don't feel particularly fluid, they at least use a traditional geared mechanical operation. Like its Micro Four Thirds counterparts from Panasonic, the Olympus uses a servoelectronic ring, resulting in the infinite rotation experience; it's not bad, just relatively loose and imprecise and takes some getting used to. The way you can retract the lens into itself when not in use is quite ingenious, however, and makes the difference between being able to slip the camera into a large jacket pocket and requiring a carrying case. Of course, if you're looking for the most compact solution, you'll have to opt for the aforementioned 17mm lens, which also has the advantage of a wider maximum aperture.

Olympus offers optional adapters for Four Thirds mount lenses (MMF-1) and for the older film OM lenses (MF-2). Surprisingly, shooting with the relatively big and heavy (and pricey) 12-60mm f2.8-4 lens via the adapter felt surprisngly well balanced--usually solutions like these feel clunky--though of course one-handed shooting is out.

Unfortunately, the E-P1's performance, which seems to suffer from a sluggish AF system, cries out for a firmware upgrade. It powers on and shoots in about 2.2 seconds, a reasonable duration. But on CNET's performance tests, shot lag (the time it takes to focus and shoot) with the kit lens in good light runs about 1.3 seconds and rises to 1.6 seconds in dim light. While it doesn't feel quite that slow in practice--if it were, it'd be close to unusable for all but landscapes and still lifes--it still feels slower than it ought to. The lens even keeps moving briefly after the focus-lock beep and indicator signal that it's done. The continuous AF really is continuous; it never stops and locks, even when pointing at a stationary subject. And though it's typical JPEG shot-to-shot time isn't the slowest among the competition--the Canon PowerShot G10 retains that crown--it's still more than twice as slow as most, and its raw shooting is slowest.

While the continuous-shooting speed is pretty good at about 3.3 frames per second, like most LCD- and EVF-based cameras you can only see what you've shot, not what you'd like to shoot. The low-resolution LCD just passes muster. It seems good enough for manual focusing in conjunction with the automatic magnification, but not as useful for judging sharpness for photos you've shot. Plus the short rated battery life (which Olympus erroneously lists as calculated with 50 percent flash usage, though the camera doesn't have a built-in flash) doesn't include shooting any video, a notorious battery drainer and likely a frequently used feature on this camera. And it simply didn't seem to last very long. All together, it adds up to a pretty poor showing in performance.

Olympus E-P1 photo samples

That's too bad, because I was quite impressed with the photo quality. Metering and exposures are very good; right in the middle, rather than the typical overexposed consumer or underexposed pro defaults. Its dynamic range seems solid, capturing detail in both highlights and shadows without clipping overmuch. Colors render accurately, and the automatic white balance is a lot better than many models of any class, indoors and out. Olympus' TruePic V image processor delivers excellent noise performance for this price class, with clean photos up through ISO 400 and good, only slightly degraded photos at ISO 800 and ISO 1600. While its high ISO performance is better than compact competitors like the Canon PowerShot G10 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, as well as Micro Four Thirds models like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 and GH1, it's still not up to dSLR competitors like the Canon EOS Rebel T1i or Nikon D5000.

The video isn't great, but it's pretty typical for this class, and it displays many of the same problems that we see with models like the T1i and D5000. It has serious moiré problems, haloing on edges, shimmering and noise in even the faintest of shadow areas, and JPEG compression artifacts from the use of the inefficient Motion JPEG codec. (File size on disk is about 250MB per minute of video, and the playback data rate runs about 34 megabits per second. Video requires a Class 6 SD card.) The continuous AF frequently got confused while shooting video as well, dropping focus and hunting unnecessarily, which complicates the issue. The video from the GH1 is better, though that's a far more expensive camera. The sound is good, as long as you're shooting indoors or on a calm day; as with most of these models, it lacks a wind filter.

Olympus is targeting 3 types of shooters with the E-P1: dSLR owners looking for a compact complement, enthusiast photographers who like that rangefinder feel of compact models like the G10 but who want interchangeable lenses, and snapshooters looking to step up from a point-and-shoot model but who are leery of the bulk of a dSLR. I can't really recommend the E-P1 to folks upgrading from a point-and-shoot, since the biggest motivation there, in addition to wanting better low-light photos, tends to be a desire for better performance to shoot kids, pets and sports. On the latter count, unfortunately, the E-P1 simply doesn't deliver. But, I think the first two groups would be more forgiving of the E-P1's performance--either because they have tricks to compensate or because they have a faster camera somewhere for shooting action--and most appreciative of the design and photo quality.

Shooting speed
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Time to first shot

Raw shot-to-shot time

Typical shot-to-shot time

Shutter lag (dim)

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon EOS Rebel T1i

0.2 

0.4 

0.37 

0.6 

0.3 

Nikon D5000

0.2 

0.5 

0.45 

0.7 

0.3 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1

0.8 

0.9 

0.9 

0.6 

0.4 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1

1.8 

0.9 

0.9 

0.6 

0.4 

Canon PowerShot G10

1.3 

2.5 

2.2 

0.8 

0.4 

Olympus E-P1

3 

2.7 

1.9 

1.6 

1.3 

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