by Miserere

  

⇐ Part 1: First Impressions

Note: The camera and accessories tested in this review were loaned to EtL by B&H Photo & Video store. To thank them for their generosity and allow us to receive more products for review, please consider purchasing your camera equipment through our affiliate B&H link (also found on the right sidebar). Thanks!
Further note: The new Olympus E-PL2 is the successor of the camera in this review and is an improvement in many ways. If you read the review and like the E-PL1, you can confidently purchase the E-PL2 knowing it is an even better camera.

  

Menus

My first test with a new digital camera is to see if I can set it up without reading the manual. If I can’t do that, it means the engineers have failed. I’m happy to report Olympus employs some good engineers for their menu system, as I was able to navigate and menu dive, exploring all the settings and adjusting parameters to my needs. Shallow diving, I should say; while all settings seem to be there, I get the feeling everything is very close in button presses, with no endless menus that you keep scrolling down through. I liked the menu system and found it very neat and tidy.

While shooting, just about every immediate parameter is available for change by pressing the START/OK button at the center of the 4-way control dial, much in the same way as you find in a P&S. Don’t put it down because of this—it’s a good thing. Being able to quickly access AF mode, WB, metering mode, or even flash EV comp is valuable in my book. I hope more camera brands start doing this. The parameters appear vertically on the right side of the screen, while the values available for the selected parameter are spread horizontally at the bottom; both have semi-transparent backgrounds. Once you’ve made the adjustment, tap the START/OK button and you’re ready to shoot.

  

Buttons, Oh Magic Buttons

Photographers love buttons and knobs; the problem is we can’t agree on what functions those buttons and knobs should perform, or where they should be. With that in mind, these are my opinions on the buttons that grace the E-PL1. Let’s start with the first button you’ll press: ON/OFF. It is recessed, which will help from accidentally turning the camera off while you’re shooting, or on while it’s in a bag. I would have preferred a switch, but at least they thought about how to make a good ON/OFF button. The second most important button is the shutter release, which is adequately dampened and located in a comfortable position, close (but not too close) to the ON/OFF. The third item located on top of the camera is the mode dial, which is one tough cookie to turn; on the up side you’re unlikely to find the camera on a different mode when you pull it out of the bag.

On the back we have a typical 4-way + center collection of 5 buttons. While shooting UP accesses EV comp, DOWN drive mode and timer, RIGHT the flash settings and LEFT the AF point choice. Like I mentioned in the previous section, the center START/OK button accesses shoot settings.

To the left and up of these buttons are 3 vertically aligned buttons that, from top to bottom, are PLAY, MENU and INFO. The first two should be obvious; the INFO button cycles through different display looks for the LCD: no info (just battery life shows up for a few seconds when you turn the camera on); a lot of info (shutter speed, aperture, EV comp, ISO, focus/exposure/file/etc/etc mode…); less info and a live histogram. I prefer this third option. In all but the no info the chosen AF point (or rather, square) is overlaid as a thin, grey square, which can be difficult to see in bright light. If using spot metering, the actual area used by the spot meter is demarcated by a circle—very nice.

To the left and down of the 4-way control is the RUBBISH button. Or TRASH, if you’re from the left side of the Atlantic.

At the top of the rear side of the E-PL1 are 3 buttons that held a lot of promise, but ended up letting me down. But first let’s focus on the good things: There is a direct video record button which new parents will probably love. As a stills photographer, I hated it because it’s in a perfect position to just press it, for the hell of it. It’s also squishy and feels completely different to the rest. Such a fun button to press…so many inadvertent videos shot… So what’s the plus side, you ask? The good people at Olympus let you customise it and assign it to another function…within limits (see table below). The other two buttons are ubiquitous on P&Ss and function in a similar function here when in playback mode; in shooting mode the one with the little magnifying glass magnifies a section (any section) of the scene 7x, 10x or 14x. This is very useful for manual focusing. The one that interests me most is the Fn button, which can also be customised…but again, only to a point. See the table below for the options available to these buttons.

Do you see anything missing? How about ISO, or AF? Boo, Olympus, boooo, boo. I hope they add these options with a firmware update. As it is I currently have the Fn button to ‘LCD OFF’ and the Rec button to ‘Manual focus’. Switching to manual focus via the Rec button is my workaround to decouple AF from the shutter release button when needed.

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment by Omgreo, we now have a way to properly decouple AF from the shutter release button: You first have to go into the advanced (two gears) menu and in the Button tab, go into the AEL/AFL option. For S-AF set it to Mode 3. Then assign AEL/AFL to either Fn or Rec. This would work best for me, as on my DSLR I have AF assigned to a button on the rear of the camera and find this works well for my needs. It’s good to have well-informed readers on our site.

  

Shooting Speed

Not much to say here, just some numbers for you to look at. I’ll point out, in case you’re a bit sleepy, that FPS is influenced by the ISO in use, showing that some noise reduction is going on at ISOs somewhere above 800 that’s taking up time. Note also how this process gets more intensive the higher the ISO. Following is a table summarising my measurements, obtained by recording the camera firing in continuous mode through software that shows the waveform, allowing precise time measurements to be made. Battery was fully charged.

  

Shooting Modes

It’s a busy mode dial, with the typical PASM + Scene modes, Art filters, video and special to Olympus, the iAUTO. All modes work as you would expect, with M being nice in that Olympus allows for auto ISO (once you allow it in one of the menus); sadly, once ISO reaches 100, if the scene is too bright for the aperture and shutter speed you’ve selected, you’re screwed and your picture will be overexposed. This is such a simple problem to fix with a few lines of code, that it really annoys me when I encounter it on a camera (it’s not just Olympus who’s at fault). This is one of those red flags that tells you in no unclear terms that no photographers were involved in the designing of this camera; not in any serious way. Sigh…

But let’s move on… Shooting in any mode is straight forward, with easy intuitive ways to change shooting parameters. Note that I didn’t say “fast”; you have to use the 4-way controller for aperture, shutter and EV comp., which is not as fast as with the dedicated controllers on the E-P1 and E-P2. That said, most of the time I didn’t miss this immediacy, and in some ways I benefited from it by thinking and being prepared ahead of time. For example, if I turned into a street that was in the shade I would open up the aperture and maybe up the ISO a stop; I’d do the opposite when walking out into bright sun. In a strange way, this little camera has made me question how I shoot—a very unexpected result of this review.

  

Art Filters

Don’t knock ‘em till you’ve tried ‘em. There 6 available are summarised in the table below. They are applied in real time to the LCD so you can see a preview of what the image will look like. But then for some reason the camera processes the image for a few seconds after you take the picture, so the preview must only be performed on the 231k binned version, which explains why it takes longer to do the same for the full 12MP image.

  

iAUTO

iAUTO is Olympus’s attempt at making photography technique simple for the masses (where the “i” in iAUTO stands for “idiot”, apparently). I use the word “attempt” because, well, they didn’t quite get there, bless their little hearts. Let me explain what I’m talking about. When you set the camera to iAUTO you lose access to many of your standard settings like aperture, shutter speed, etc. You can change the drive mode, select focus points, and switch between auto flash or flash off, but that’s it. When you press START/OK you are now shown a range of options for your photo that use “plain English” instead of that undecipherable photographic lingo. Here’s a list of what you can do:

I loved reading the shooting tips, where Olympus regales us with haiku-like poetry such as this:

Shade of cloud or parasol
makes shadow of
flowers softer.

All joking aside, I do think the novice who cares about improving their photography can learn something from these haiku-sized nuggets of wisdom, but a good introductory book would go a lot further.

But the reason I complained at the beginning of this section about Olympus not quite succeeding with their iAUTO mode is because all the changes I listed in the table above are mutually exclusive, meaning: You can pick only one. What happens if you want to make your image brighter and increase your DoF and make it warmer? Then you’ll need to go beyond iAUTO. Maybe this is Olympus’s way of nudging you off the branch so you can learn to fly on your own.

  

That LCD

The LCD on the Digital Pen family has received the brunt of criticisms levied against the trio of cameras. While the E-P1 and E-P2 have 3″ LCDs, the E-PL1′s screen is slightly smaller at 2.7″; either way they all sport 231k resolution, which is low by today’s standards. After almost 3 weeks and several GB of shooting, I no longer notice the LCD and can look right through it, so to speak. But I do admit that the first impression was not good and I can imagine people not buying the camera because of it. To those people I say: Give it a chance.

Despite the lowish resolution, I still found it easy to focus manually, which is great for macro work where one tends to set the lens to closest focus distance and then move the camera back and forth to focus. In this fashion I obtained more keepers than I do with my DSLR and optical viewfinder, which has convinced me that the next DSLR I purchase must have live view. Shooting with my arm extended above my head was also easier, despite the LCD not being articulated due to the screen’s large viewing angle, which gave me enough detail to make out my composition and where my focus square was located. Which brings us to our next section.

  

Power Consumption

I never depleted the battery in one day to figure out if it lasts as long as the specs say, so I can’t comment. One thing I did to save battery is make one of the custom buttons an LCD OFF/ON switch, so while I was walking with the camera the LCD would be off and I’d turn it on when I saw a photographic opportunity. LCDs are battery hogs, so I’m sure this practice prolongs battery life. I would like to have seen an option to set an auto LCD off time; I would choose maybe 10s. The only option I found was to choose sleep time from 1, 3, 5, 10 minutes, or never. There is also an option to dim the LCD backlight after 8s, 30s, 1 minute, or never; this should be a “turn off” option, not “dim”. In the camera’s vein of never-ending customisation, you can choose how early or late it will warn you of low battery.

  

Flash

Some people seem to have an aversion to flashes on small cameras, but I think they’re a good investment in space. The E-PL1′s flash in particular is very nice; it pops up quite high, you have to release it manually (I hate flashes that pop up on their own), it’s off to one side (the further away to the side of the lens a flash is, the less red-eye syndrome you’ll encounter) and is reasonably powerful. Best of all, it’s highly customisable (as you might have expected). These are the modes available: Auto, Redeye, Fill In, Flash Off, Red-Eye Slow, Slow, Slow2 (2^nd curtain), Full, 1/4, 1/16, 1/64. How’s that for choice? You can even choose from two different spellings of red eye. But that’s not all; these are the flash modes, accessed quickly by hitting the right arrow button I should add, but then you also have the flash EV comp, which is one of the options accessed through START/OK. Here you are able to fine tune the flash power in 1/3 stops (or 1/2 or 1/1 stops if that’s how you set the camera up) from -3 stops to +3; that’s more than my DSLR allows! I know it’s only a guide number of 7m at ISO 100 (apparently 10m at ISO 200), but you can always mount a bigger flash on the hotshoe if you really need it, and unlike the S90, you can use the onboard flash to wirelessly control up to 3 sets of Olympus’s flashes.

One final thing I like about the flash is that due to its design you can use your left forefinger to easily point it upwards, providing instant bounce flash. It would be great if some smart engineer at Olympus found a way to make it stay pointing up. True, this isn’t the most powerful flash, but with the appropriate ISO you can bounce it and make it effective. In fact, stay tuned, this evening I’ll take some pics of my darkened living room so you can see what I’m talking about.

  

Focusing

In tight competition with the LCD for “most hated feature” on the E-P1 and E-P2 was the AF, which has been called glacial, sluggish and unusable; many early buyers returned their cameras because of it. Are my standards so, so low? I didn’t find the AF unusable with either of the two lenses I tired (the kit 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 and the pancake 17mm f/2.8) . No, it’s not lightning fast (it’s not a Canon 1D mk IV with 24-70mm f/2.8L), but it’s entirely usable and I have many photos attesting to it. Having said that, I can imagine a few cases where it’s not ideal: Sports, kids, F1 racing… But then many DSLRs struggle with these focusing situations too. At the end of the day this is a contrast detect AF system that is still not at the level of the phase detect systems used in DSLRs; but it’s not glacial either.

Where the AF does suck is in continuous mode. There is no smart algorithm here figuring out how your subject is moving (away from or towards us), instead the lens focuses in-and-out in rapid succession, continuously, in order to capture the subject in focus at some point during its (the lens’s) little in-and-out trips. This system is both rudimentary and inefficient, and I hope there are some engineers at Olympus working overtime to provide an upgrade via firmware soon.

The other good idea turned bad is AF tracking. The idea is as follows: You select a region on the LCD where your subject is, then you half-press the shutter release and the camera autofocuses on the subject; when the subject moves, the AF square region follows it across the LCD, or keeps track of it if you move your camera with the subject. It’s also useful for when your subject is motionless but you want to reframe the shot yet still keep the subject in focus (macros, portraits…). It works best with objects that don’t move too fast; it seemed to track cyclists fine, but struggled with cars unless they were sufficiently far away that they filled the AF square region. Sadly, and here comes the bad part, it is unusable on most moving subjects because it suffers from severe shutter lag; I didn’t measure it, but at least 0.5s, making it almost useless. As a reframe while keeping your imobile subject in focus tool, it’s great, and a very useful tool at that, but it’s a shame it can’t be used with birds in flight, moving athletes, cars, etc.

One “trick” mode that does come in handy is face detection. Instead of selecting a focus point, you let the camera search for a face amongst all of them, and in bright light it’s successful most of the time. In low light, not so much. Still, a very useful feature for us people shooters, especially if you’re shooting from the hip or pretending to look the other way. Verdict: Face detection is not a gimmick!

Finally, I’ll talk about the focus points. They are 11 squares arranged in 3 adjacent rows, with the middle row having 5 and the top and bottom having 3. You can choose a single square, or all of them. It would have been useful if you could select a whole row or column; I wonder why they didn’t think about this. It would also be useful if you could define the size of the square, because as they are now they are quite large and make it impossible to focus securely on the eye of your subject if taking a full head shot.

  

Real World Shooting™

Given all the criticisms levied against this poor camera across the internets you’d think it’s impossible to take a photo with it. In fact, the opposite is true, and I have some very nice images to boot. After a little over 3 weeks of using it almost daily I’m beginning to get the hang of it, which is sad because I have to return it shortly. Now don’t think there is a steep learning curve to using the camera, because I found it very intuitive and easy to shoot with. However, for some of my work shooting street scenes I need very quick reflexes to set the camera and shoot without thinking about it. This takes training, and having been shooting with a DSLR for almost 3 years I have certain habits engrained, which makes shooting an LCD camera more work to adjust to.

My slowness to learn new tricks notwithstanding, I had no issues when photographing anything calm, and while my reflexes were lacking for some of my street photography, the camera did provide me with new ways of shooting. One of the problems candid street photographers have is being noticed, and nothing screams PHOTOGRAPHER like a big DSLR being lifted to your face. With the E-PL1 in my hand, however, nobody paid attention to me; I was just another tourist. With live view and a wide angle I was able to take photos without people noticing, even when I was less than a meter away. And the shutter, while louder than I expected, is quieter than the shutter plus mirror slap in my DSLR and is easily drowned by ambient noise in most crowds and streets. And when people did notice me pointing the camera in their general direction, they reacted differently than when the same happens when I have a DSLR in my hands. Most of the time they would apologise for getting in the way of my shot and move on—with my DSLR I often get suspicious looks and “are you a professional photographer?” questions.

The responsiveness of the camera is at DSLR levels (apart from the aforementioned continuous AF and tracking issues). I have it set to take the photo no matter what, and every time I pressed the shutter button it instantly took the photo. I didn’t find myself missing many more shots than I do with my DSLR, and when I did, it more due to my unfamiliarity with the camera than anything else. Live view has opened up a wealth of oportunities for taking photos I wouldn’t think of with my DSLR; case in point is the photo to the right, so easy to compose and take with the E-PL1.

  

Using Non-μ4/3 Lenses

One of the reasons the micro 4/3 cameras have been so successful is because of all the lenses from other brands that you can attach to them via an adapter. This opens up the potential market for these cameras to shooters from any brand. But not all lenses were made equal, and it’s rangefinder lenses in the Leica M mount that best fit on these bodies due to their small size and short registration distance. Nevertheless, I went ahead and used some of my Pentax K mount lenses with a Novoflex adapter when I wanted more reach and/or a larger aperture (see photo at top of article). I found some interesting things: Good lenses, like those from the Pentax Limited line, performed well, but some other lenses that work well on my 10.4MP APS-C DSLR performed poorly on the E-PL1. I suspect the sensor may be packing its pixels too tightly and taxing those particular lenses. This raises the question of whether or not I’ll be able to use these lenses on a higher pixel count DSLR if I ever upgrade.

Bear in mind that mounting any non-4/3 lens on a micro 4/3 camera means you lose all automation, so you have to perform both focusing and diaphragm close down. Or you can be like me and just shoot wide open all the time, this way you just have to concentrate on focusing. Which, to my suprise and happiness, was extremely easy on the big LCD screen, and could be made even easier (or at least precise) by pressing the magnification button, which magnifies a user-defined section of the LCD 7x, 10x or 14x. I wish there were an option for 4x, as more often than not 7x was too much for hand-holding with lenses longer than 50mm or so (but great for macro on a tripod). On the other hand, 7x or 10x magnification is very useful when manually focusing wideangles. Most of the time I just used the LCD without any magnification and my success rate was much higher than with my DSLR and viewfinder focusing (with the same lenses). In low light, the LCD will brighten up allowing for even easier focusing.

  

Exposure

I’ll keep it short: Exposures are perfect. I use mostly center-weighted, but matrix metering worked well too. I was very impressed with the metering in just about every situation I encountered. If I ever used EV comp it was for artistic purposes.

Exposure often gives DSLR users headaches when they MacGyver a foreign lens onto their camera. No issues to report with the E-PL1. Yep, that’s it: Exposure was consistent with all third party lenses I tried, at any aperture. The joys of on-the-sensor metering, I suppose.

Here’s a tip of the hat to Olympus: If you’re not happy with the exposure, you can set a general exposure shift of up to ±1 EV (in 1/6 EV steps) for each of the main metering methods (matrix, center-weighted and spot) independently.

  

Conclusion

The Olympus E-PL1 is an easy to use camera that can work equally well in the hands of an inexperienced novice, as in those of a seasoned shooter. If you leave it alone, use the camera defaults and shoot in Program mode, you’ll get great pictures. If you want to customise the hell out of it to set everything to your liking, you can do that too, and you’ll get even greater pictures…or maybe not, but at least you’ll have fun customising the many option Olympus gives you.

Part 3: Image Quality & Conclusion ⇒

  

  

Please consider purchasing the Olympus Pen E-PL1 or E-PL2 from B&H. We’ll get a small commission and you’ll get our eternal gratitude

  

Note: Links in this article might be to one of our affiliate stores. Purchases made from our affiliates through these links will benefit Enticing the Light at no extra cost to you.

Related posts:

1. Review – Olympus Pen E-PL1, Part 1: First Impressions
2. Review – Olympus Pen E-PL1, Part 3: Image Quality & Conclusion
3. Review – Canon S90, Part 2: Using the Camera
4. Review – Samsung NX10, Part 2: Using the Camera
5. Review – Panasonic G2, Part 1: Introduction and Using the Camera