Olympus Pen E-P1

Nine months after Panasonic brought out its G1, Olympus is offering its vision of the micro four thirds. The manufacturer has chosen to revive it as part of a 1960s mini-SLR range, the Pen Fs, with an ultra compact retro camera. A nice idea but does the Pen E-P1 live up to expectations?

Handling

Getting to grips with the E-P1 is a rather particular experience. Although everyone will recognise the retro look, reactions are mitigated: older users seem to enjoy the retro feel but younger ones are a lot more critical - "big", they say, "ugly", "not modern". The E-P1 doesn't remind them of anything and stepping back in time holds no pleasure for them.

Leaving feelings to one side (the author of this review is obviously one of the older users), the E-P1 is well built with a nicely assembled metal casing. A space for your thumb and an adhesive rectangle give nice handling and the camera is quite light (around half a kilo and ready to go with its 14-42 mm zoom, only just 400 g with the 17 mm) until you start adding heavy accessories (see inset). Unfortunately, like with the E-400 series, you'll note that Olympus has put the attachments for the strap in just the wrong place, to the point where you quickly develop the habit of getting hold of the camera above the strap to put it in the palm of your hand!

The Panasonic micro four thirds, the G1 and GH1, have a mini-SLR look about them that is common for bridges. With the E-P1, Olympus has gone for the compact look; a little larger than the Canon G10 for example, it is however slightly shorter. This makes it a bit big by modern compact standards but very small compared to other cameras with exchangeable lenses; equipped with its 17 mm lens it can easily slip into an anorak pocket.


At the back, note the nice 7.6 cm screen with a limited resolution of 230,000 pixels - this is inadmissible for a camera in this class (compacts that cost 250 pounds have double!). A good thing about it is that it is less shiny than the average screen, making it relatively good outside. The controls are well spaced out and the scroll allows you to vary different settings very quickly.

When you turn it on, you find the good and bad we've come to expect from Olympus. On the plus side, the OK button gives access to all the settings. On the down side, the menus are long and not always very logical.

The E-P1 is nice to use, reacts well and starts up quite quickly. The main problem is that you have to put it in P mode. In auto intelligent mode, scene recognition leaves something to be desired and the camera seems to focus randomly, not necessarily finding the subject when you're taking a photo of people's faces for example (no comparison with Panasonic's auto modes).

Focus speed is something Olympus has often been criticised for. The E-P1 is no exception unfortunately: both with the 14-42 mm and the 17 mm lens, the autofocus takes more than half a second. Better than any SLR for focus speed (including the recent E-620) and better than most compacts, the E-P1 is still however behind its cousins from Osaka. What's more, when equipped with the Panasonic 14-45 mm lens that the G1 comes with, the E-P1 is faster by around two tenths of a second.

Battery life is also disappointing. In our test, the battery it comes with lasted for much less than the 300 photos claimed on the box - we only got 200.

Image quality

We didn't expect any surprises from the E-P1: its sensor, similar to those on the G1 and E-620, is well known. The moderate smoothing at 800 ISO is hardly surprising then, a little more pronounced at 1600 ISO (still fine for a 20x30 print however) and a drastic fall in quality at 3200 ISO. Beyond that, as usual, it's more a question of trying to rescue the image than anything else...


The only real question is with stabilization quality, the E-P1 using a sensor displacement system in spite of the fact that it is so thin. A little disappointing here: the barbie only becomes sharp systematically at 1/25th of a second, intermittently sharp at 1/13th. Here again we compared with and without the 14-45 Panasonic lens; even when mounted on the E-P1, it gave us the same results as with the G1 back in November, with usually acceptable sharpness at 1/5th of a second and perfect sharpness at 1/10th.
Another remark: lens quality. Our test E-P1 came with a double kit with a 14-42 mm zoom and a relatively bright (f/2.8) fixed 17 mm lens. The first gave relatively banal results (precision good without being extraordinary, particularly with the aperture fully open). Note that it moves back into its barrel when not in use so as to make the camera 1 cm thinner.

The 17 mm lens is very disappointing: the images lack a bit of crunch with the aperture fully open, even in the centre, and they lack sharpness on the sides even at f/5.6. It's even more of a shame that the concept of the E-P1 is based on this type of lens...

Lastly, we were expecting great things in terms of video from this camera, a sort of ideal notebook for budding reporters. It films in 720p at 30 images per second. Unfortunately, here again, the E-P1 doesn't really live up to its promise: the continuous autofocus is erratic with videos, sometimes fixing on one subject then moving on to another for a few seconds to find a better contrast. This is logical but on the E-P1 it is particularly sensitive, only stopping when the contrast truly melts away - the Panasonic GH1 does this with much more subtlety and detects the loss in contrast much more quickly.


The Zuiko M 14-42 mm autofocus motor is noisy and sometimes affects the sound on the video... Those who really want a video feature would do better going for the GH1...or even the TZ7!