Olympus Pen E-P1 hands-on

I've just spent a day with the new Olympus Pen E-P1. A very nice day it was too: the midsummer sun was shining and I was in Berlin, so I set out to discover whether the Pen is as razor sharp as the city's architecture.


When it's released in July, the E-P1 will aim to offer the sort of control and picture quality normally associated with an SLR, but in a compact body. It's a Micro Four Thirds camera (the first from Olympus), which allows for interchangeable lenses but dispenses with the mirror and pentaprism arrangement of an SLR. Compared to an SLR, this allows for a more compact overall design with smaller lenses, but also means there's no proper viewfinder.

First impressions are very positive. In the hand, the E-P1 is solid and shiny in all the right places (except for the plastic rim of the mode dial). It's available in silver or white, so take your pick - I'll have silver please. A leathery panel on the front boosts grippability and adds to the retro styling, and when fitted with the 17mm pancake lens (which together with the camera will set you back £749) it's a neat, discreet snapper.

However, to make the most of the E-P1 you'd probably want the 14-42mm zoom lens (pictured, £699 together with the camera). The good news is that it still has a modest profile even with this attached. This was the lens I used around the city. So let's have a look at some pictures I took, all of which can be viewed in full hi-res on my Flickr stream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/93783325@N00/

Or just click on them to go there.

We may as well do this like a slideshow and I'll just talk around the pictures.



One reason I concentrated on exterior shots was that the Pen has no built-in flash. You can attach one to the hot shoe, but then it starts to become much less compact and convenient. However, outside on a day like today it does a great job of picking out fine details. Here, for example, the edges of the windows stay crisp to the end of the block, with hardly any fringing visible when viewed pixel-for-pixel.



This is me with the camera, just for the record, so you know I'm not making this up. It's fuzzy close up because it's shot into a reflective window, so don't let that put you off.



Because much of the camera works and feels like an SLR, the lack of a viewfinder can take some getting used too. Part of that is to do with the way you hold the camera - when twiddling a focus ring or a zoom, I want to put my eye up to the camera, but instead everything has to be monitored from the LCD on the back. As usual, in bright sunlight that can be tricky. You can pop a little viewfinder on top, but it's of little use as it's not connected to the lens.



Back to the compactness, and I managed to squat under a tree to snap this one, undetected by three policemen and a German shepherd. While I think of it, there's a nice little clunk when you take a picture.



This picture doesn't illustrate it, but the Pen does 720p HD video too. The 30fps footage is pretty sharp, and benefits from depth of field and focus effects during filming, if you're that way inclined.



Access to the manual controls is direct and logical, so less experienced users are more likely to get stuck in - a good thing seeing as that's really the point of this camera.



So, is the Pen as razor sharp as Berlin's architecture? Take a look at the hi-res originals and see for yourself, but I'd say it's a pretty good match, at least when you're shooting at low ISO. Watch out for a full test on Stuff.tv very soon.