“I really like your camera. What is it?” said the hip young checkout guy in my local Waitrose supermarket, eyeing the Olympus I had on loan for review. Earlier, taking pictures in Nonsuch Park, I’d been approached by a couple who were in need of a new camera and asked about the lens. Even my wife liked the look of it, and she’s allergic to almost every technology not used in shoes or handbags. I’ve hauled a lot of cameras across several continents without anyone noticing, but the Pen E-P3 attracted attention like nothing else.
The all-white body and super-shiny lens make it highly visible, of course, but that’s not the same as interesting. Perhaps it’s the slightly retro styling, which stirs memories of the days when David Bailey (Who’s he?) advertised Olympus’s 35mm compacts on prime-time ITV. Either way, the new Pen E-P3 works well as male or female jewelry, even if you never actually use it.
Apart from its looks, the Pen belongs to an interesting new breed known as Micro Four Thirds cameras or ILCs (Interchangeable Lens Compacts), which hark back to the great pre-SLR days of 35mm Leica and Contax cameras.
So far, the bulk of the market has been split between small, cheap compact cameras and expensive DSLRs. The compacts have very small sensors, which limits their image quality, while the DSLRs have big sensors but big everything else. So, why not try something in-between? Make it small and portable, like a compact, but with a big sensor and interchangeable lenses, like a DSLR. This was the idea that led Olympus and Panasonic (Lumix) to create the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) system.
The 4/3 sensor is from 5x to 10x bigger than the ones in compact cameras, but about 40% smaller than the APS-C sensor used in prosumer DSLRs. On paper, it’s a good compromise, but how does it work in real life?
Well, the E-P3 does work as compact camera, except for having to unlock the lens manually before taking snapshots. The screen is above average in being readable in sunlight, the automatic focusing is quick, and pictures are taken without undue shutter lag. The camera also provides comprehensive auto settings plus full manual controls, and if you’re not so keen on buttons and dials, many adjustments can be made via the capacitative touch screen on the back, iPhone-style. Other bonus features include an orange beam to help with focusing in low light, and a spiffy, variable-strength pop-up flash on the left camera top. This is the Olympus’s third version of this model (after the E-P1 and E-P2), so it’s had time to refine the design and remove any glitches.
The E-P3 was supplied with a 3x zoom lens that went from a wide-angle 14mm to a telephoto 42mm — the equivalent of a 28-84mm zoom on a 35mm camera. This is short of the range you can get with compacts nowadays, but it covers most needs.
When I got home from the park and moved the images from the SD card to my PC, I was impressed by the quality of the pictures, which were all taken on the Auto setting. The sky had been partly cloudy and I hadn’t expected, for example, such vividly coloured flowers. The EP-3 should therefore work well as a snapshot camera, when you just want to take pictures without worrying about photography, as well as letting you be as creative as you want.
I took the same test pictures with four different cameras, and in general I preferred the cooler and more natural look produced by my Nikon D90: the Pen can be a bit too mighty. However, the E-P3 provides sliders that let you adjust the colour on a sliding scale between Clear & Vivid and Flat & Muted, so you can set it to match your taste, or mine. Also, I found the Pen had automatically saved a RAW image in Olympus’s ORF format. Keen users can process this sensor data to create the kind of JPEG they like. Indeed, RAW images can be edited and combined (overlaid) in the camera,
But my real problem with the E-P3 is the suggested price: £799 or $899. You could get a really good DSLR for that (with better image quality and a wider choice of lenses), or a really good fixed-lens compact for half the price (albeit without the larger sensor or a choice of lens). If you’re upgrading from a compact to get interchangeable lenses, this kind of camera is well worth a look. If you find your DSLR is just too bulky to carry around, again, this could be the answer. If you already have both, like me, it’s pretty hard to justify the cost. Guess I’ll have to go back to being ignored.
