Thanks to the wonderful Ghene Snowdon, I was able to spend a couple of hours today on the streets of central London playing with the new Olympus E-P1. Before I get into my thoughts on this little camera, a big thank-you to Ghene for letting me play with it (even if I did seem to disappear quite often – sorry if you thought I was running off with it!).

The Look and Feel

There’s no real doubting that the E-P1 is a stylish piece of kit. It has a slightly-updated-but-retro look, being more or less just a digital version of the original Olympus Pen cameras. Although the one I was using is silver with black trim, there are other colours in the works; still, the silver and black is perfect even to my unstylish eyes.

It’s a bit of an odd feeling to go from holding my 450D to holding the E-P1, which doesn’t have a bulging grip like a DSLR. It takes a bit of getting used to, but used to it I got very quickly. If you’re moving from a point & shoot, rather than a DSLR, this won’t be a problem. The E-P1 also has a nice, solid metal feel in the hand – the build quality feels better than on my ‘cheap’ plastic Canon.

The only problem I have with this camera as a concept – a concept that I think is absolutely fantastic, by the way – is that a large lens on it (via an adaptor ring) starts to make it feel badly balanced, and I only felt it with a 25mm f/1.4, so goodness knows how it would cope with a 70-200mm. That said, the micro four-thirds mount lenses are tiny. The pancake 17mm is ridiculously small. If you’re used to lugging a big camera bag around, forget it. This is a handbag or pocket camera, even with accessories.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about the viewfinder – or lack thereof. The E-P1 has no viewfinder, except an odd contraption that slots onto the hotshoe, which would be nice if it had any way of showing the field of view for the lens you’re currently using. Which it doesn’t, so I didn’t like it at all, which means I needed to use the live view screen. Now, again I’m coming at this from the DSLR end – so I’m used to using a viewfinder to focus and compose my shots. I do remember, however, using my old Sony Cybershot’s LCD all the time – and, again, this is merely something that takes just a little bit of getting used to. (The big downside to this, of course, is that the LCD drains battery – although I didn’t have a problem in the couple of hours I had it, and Ghene had plenty of spare batteries, I wouldn’t forget the charger if going on holiday for a week!)

The final note is one regarding the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens – while it’s a nice little lens, the zoom ring wasn’t as smooth as I’d like. While this isn’t an issue when taking photos, I find it did cause issues when shooting video, but more on that when I’ve uploaded a test video. Using different lenses, of course, would mitigate this to a large extent – but who wants to have to buy another lens for a smooth zooming-while-shooting video experience?

The photos

Wandering around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square, I tried to take a range of different shots to illustrate this little camera’s abilities. You can see the test shots here on Flickr, but I’ll flag up a couple below – click on the images to go through to larger sizes on Flickr.

All images below have been through Lightroom to resize and change exposure slightly (being a novice with this camera, I managed to take quite a few shots at +0.3EV…), but no colour/contrast adjustments. Standard sharpening for screen has been applied on export, too – but apart from those minor things, they’re straight from camera. (The .ORF files produced by the E-P1 aren’t readable yet, so I was shooting RAW+JPEG, and these come from the jpegs. There may be mildly better results once I can read the .ORFs, so please bear that in mind!)

Portrait of Ghene

First up, this quick portrait of Ghene herself. It’s as sharp as you could possibly want – no quibbles with it. It’s got a nice pleasing depth of field that you often just can’t control with a point and shoot camera.

Toy Cars

These toy cars behind a window I really like. The colours came out a little flat for my liking – but this may just be the jpeg processing in-camera, or my faulty memory of what they actually looked like in the store window. Either way, it’s something I’m sure can be corrected in post-processing.

Covent Garden roofline

Finally, we have this building in Covent Garden. It’s a shot I like, actually, for my own perverse reasons, but if you take a look at the larger size on Flickr, you’ll notice that the dark areas of the balconies are actually quite noisy. I don’t know why this is – it’s at ISO 400, which has produced absolutely fine results elsewhere in the set (and a test image I took at the camera’s highest ISO setting was pretty decent too – not quite what you could get from a Canon 5D mk II, but up there), but it’s possibly something to take note of.

Conclusions

I only had a couple of hours to play with the E-P1, not really long enough to get to know it properly – but the time I did spend with it, I really enjoyed. Once you get beyond the initial change of grip and balance, it’s pretty easy to use. It takes very decent pictures, and doesn’t get the same looks as a big, black (D)SLR – meaning it’s perfect for street photography; its size and the size of its lenses also make it a great travel camera to get the same results without the extra baggage of a DSLR and lenses.

The price does scare me, somewhat, but I suppose Olympus have invested a lot of money developing this new micro four-thirds standard, and need to recoup it somehow. I’m not going to rush out and buy one just yet – I’m not in the market right now – but when I do want a new toy, I think the E-P1 has a very good chance of being it!