jhapeman
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 p.1 #1 · Twenty Four Hours with the Olympus E-P1 | |
Well, the subject line says it all. I ordered my Olympus E-P1 last week when they first showed up on B&H and was lucky enough to get one before they sold out. I was supposed to get it on Friday, but UPS screwed up and I didn't get it until last night at 6:00 pm. I've now had it for 24 hours and done a bunch of shooting with it--roughly 250 shots between last evening and this evening. I figured I would summarize my observations for those interested, as I know interest in this camera is very high.
General Camera Observations
First impressions out of the box are that this is a very well-made camera. It feels nice in the hand, and even though the lens is plastic, it also feels very well-built. The bundle includes a nice strap. Overall, the weight feels nearly identical to my G10, and in fact it's 15g lighter. The camera is very attractive, and while I would prefer an all-black or nearly all-black body, it's not as shiny as it might look from the product shots on the web.
The camera UI is pretty well-done, and mostly pretty easy to figure out. It's a little "deep" and could stand to be simplified. It makes you appreciate the very slick UI Canon has developed on the G9/G10. It has a weird way of turning on the more advanced settings--which are hidden by default--so you really have to read the manual to get the full benefit of this camera. That said, it is highly customizable, with tons of useful options in the menu.
In terms of buttons, the camera is a bit sparse on top, but overall its adequate. The shutter button is very responsive and well-placed. There is an EV compensation button on top; it's oddly placed and perhaps would be better placed on the back, but I did learn to make it work for me. I like the way the mode dial is recessed from above and changed via a thumb wheel that comes out on the back. Again, this is where the G10 in particular leads the way: the manual mode dials on the G10 are brilliant and allow for rapid changes of standard items such as EV and ISO. I'd love to see something similar on the E-P1. The rear wheel works well, but it a tad bit small. The vertically-oriented thumb wheel is used for zooming images, and it works very well.
Rear LCD Screen
This is my only disappointment so far with the E-P1. The screen is actually very good, with great color and contrast, and a very good anti-reflective coating on a matte finish. I found it more usable than my G9/G10 today when out in bright sunlight, primarily because of the matte finish. You can tweak both the brightness and the color rendition of the rear screen. The main disappointment is that its only 230,000 pixels. With all of the other high-end compacts already going to 460,000 pixels, I found its hard to go back. You don't have nearly the ability to judge critical focus that you do with a higher-resolution screen. This is partly compensated by how much you can zoom in on the images, but it would still be preferable to have a higher-resolution screen.
Autofocus Performance
A topic of some discussion on the Internet is the AF performance of this camera. The best way for me to summarize it is to compare it. It's very similar to my G9/G10; maybe just a tiny bit slower than the G10, but not by much. The face-detect function works very well. Like all AF systems, it slows down and hunts more as it gets into lower-light situations. I didn't find the AF to be a problem in any of the shooting I did today; while its not at DSLR performance levels, it is really very good. It's also very accurate, and I didn't have any shots where the AF missed after it locked. There is a dedicated mode that allows you to manual override the AF, which is where I left it all the time. That said, I never intervened with MF as a result of missed focus, and only used it a few times to change my DOF/perspective combination with selective focus.
I will stick the in-body IS system in here as well, since its somewhat related to AF. It works very well, and I'm not sure what else to say. They claim four stops and I would say its very close to that based on my shooting so far. Because of the potential for using old Olympus OM lenses and other third-party lenses via adapter, the fact that the IS is in-body is actually very attractive.
Image Quality
This is the meat of the camera. Many camera enthusiasts have longed and begged for a camera like the E-P1, with a larger sensor in a smaller body. The reason is image quality. Here the E-P1 delivers and delivers in spades. Olympus has put a very good sensor in this camera; the dynamic range and noise capabilities are very similar to most DSLRs. It's a 2x crop sensor, so its nice and big, and I like that Olympus kept it to 12MP rather than try to cram any more in there. Images look great up to ISO 800, where a little bit of noise creeps in--but very little. It is very usable at ISO 1600, and I would feel quite comfortable using ISO 3200 in a pinch. Even ISO 6400 would be acceptable for a web-sized image.
The low-pass anti-aliasing filter must be very weak, as the images are very sharp right out of the camera. This is an improvement from other Olympus cameras based on images I have seen on the web. Overall I would say that the image quality is extremely close to a 40D or 50D.
Related to image quality is the quality of the jpeg engine in the camera. I don't use jpeg very often, but when I want it, I want the images to come out of the camera ready for printing or publishing on the web. The in-camera jpegs come out very nice, with good detail and color. You will want to tune the noise reduction and shadow fill to taste (Olympus has a setting called "gradation" that can be used to open up or close up the shadows in images), as well as saturation and sharpening, but the choices are well-done, and I could get the camera to kick out very pleasing jpeg images with just a little work. The auto white balance does a pretty good job, although it generally renders images a bit warmer than I like. I can live with it in the jpegs, and can tune it out in the raw files.
Performance
The camera performs very well. The write speed and fps are very good for a camera of this type and size. The camera feels very responsive in use, and the AF--as detailed above--is very good. Browsing the menus is very quick. The camera powers up and is ready for shooting very quickly. The main slowdown is extending the zoom lens from the retracted position, which has to be done manually. That won't be an issue with the primes and non-collapsing zooms. Shot to shot speed is very good. The camera can shoot continuously at a rate of 3fps which is great for a compact camera, and more than I will likely ever use on this camera. The buffer clears pretty quickly, especially with a fast SD card. I have been using a Sandisk Extreme III 8GB card. I have not waited on the camera buffer or card at all.
Bundled Software
The bundled software is adequate. I would not normally load the manufacturer's software, but I need it to open the raw files. It has limited controls for raw editing, but enough to be useful for now. I am eager for the next release of ACR to include support for the E-P1. Hopefully Apple will support it in OS X as well, so I can use Aperture for the file management. I suspect it will be in a OS X patch in the coming months, although Apple is a bit spotty with releases for camera raw files. I used the Olympus software to make some adjustments to raw files and then saved as TIFFs to open in Photoshop so I could run my "prepare for web" action. Those files are missing the full EXIF data in my gallery.
Final Thoughts and Gallery
Overall I am hugely satisfied with this camera. It's almost everything I would have wanted. It will definitely be the camera I pick up most often when out around town, or on a quick family trip. I took it today to a petting zoo, and I have a number of the shots in the gallery I will be linking below. I really hope that Canon decides to make a camera like this, but if not, I won't care much if Olympus makes a few more lenses for this camera and works to improve the ergonomics a bit. In the end, a camera like this needs a new ecosystem of lenses anyway, so having a different manufacturer than most of my gear is not really an issue. I am also looking forward to someone developing an adapter for the Leica M glass. It would be great to stick some premium fast glass on this camera. I am quite sure that this will happen in fairly short order.
Bottom line: This is a ground-breaking camera, and I will be keeping it. I can't believe that it took so long for a manufacturer to put a model like this out there.
Here's a selection of shots from my first 24 hours with the E-P1. I will have to wait to upload larger files, as I am at my vacation house with only satellite internet, which has a bandwidth cap. In the meantime, these web-sized images give you some taste of what the camera can do. I will try to answer any questions anyone here might have.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhapeman/sets/72157620942156065/
Jeff
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