Making a Scene
When you choose either the Scene or the Art button you get a brief explanation of what each option does and when it's best used. Scene modes include fireworks, landscape, portrait and night portrait. There's a useful landscape+portrait option too, for those scenes where you want to capture both an iconic scene or building with your companions in the foreground.
The setting that's most fun on the E-P1, though, is undoubtedly the Art mode. Here, you get a choice of six filters including Pin Hole, Grainy Film, Soft Focus and Pop Art.
We were less convinced of the usefulness of the Pale & Light Colour option in which "reality in front of you is enclosed in a flat, gentle light, floating serenely in its own world like an image in your memory". As far as we could tell, it deliberates washes out otherwise colourful photos.
Light tone, meanwhile, renders both shade and highlight areas equally and seems the antithesis of depth of field. When taking shots that needed to look uniform from left to right, as in the shot of the three identical glass buildings, we were pleased to report exposure and scale were handled adeptly with no sign of lens barrelling.
Pin Hole allowed us to indulge in experimentation with a glitterball up against a regularly-patterned ceiling, while Pop Art was a great choice if we wanted shots to really stand out. On the already vibrant Aladdin truck it was staggering while the snap we took off some deck chairs on the bank next to a brightly-coloured boat was hurriedly composed but saved by the colour filter.
It was the grainy old film mode that was our favourite, however, and its moody effects seemed perfect for the mid 20th-century look that many scenes we encountered in Berlin for the Olympus launch suggested.
Detailed Display
We were really taken with the 3in, vibrant LiveView LCD of the Olympus E-P1 which offers plenty of detail (230,00 dots, in fact) and is effective for viewing and playing back video. The LiveView display was almost able to keep up even as we barrelled through the city on our bust journey.
Video is one of the distinguishing features of the Olympus versus its rival Micro FourThirds camera, the Panasonic G1. We hope to test this in more detail when we get our review sample in the next week or two. However, initial tests showed really vibrant, well-defined colour and detail and smooth playback.
One worry about this camera, however, was that we seemed to drain the battery quite fast, even though we were too busy taking photos to review those we’d taken or to experiment with the video mode to any extent.
The 12.3Mp Olympus PEN E-P1 is larger than a standard compact digital camera such as a Canon Ixus or a Sony Cyber-shot and has interchangeable lenses. Here's our hands-on report
Specifications
Olympus PEN E-P1 digital camera; Micro FourThirds; 3in LiveView LCD (230,000 dots); digital SLR; multi-point auotfocus; image stabilisation; six scene modes; art filters; video capture; HDMI output; 335g; 121x70x35mm
Verdict
The retro feel of the Olympus E-P1 is wonderful. It's the sort of camera that puts a smile on your face when you use it and we loved the amount of control it gave us over what we took and its final look. In fact, our main criticism of a camera purportedly for the more general camera fan is its price. The £599 (about US$990) body only headline price makes the Olympus E-P1 seem expensive given that it doesn't claim to be a pro or even semi-pro model. You can buy it as a bundle for £749 (about US$1,238) with the 17mm pancake lens and separate viewfinder or, better still, the 14-42mm lens for £699 (about US$1,155). For both lenses it's £899 (about US$1,486).
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