Friday, August 26, 2011

First test of the Olympus PEN E-P2

I bought an Olympus E-P2 from Rajala Pro Shop. I became very interested in the new E-P3, then read the test and was slighly disappointed. The performance did not really match its price, but it did result in a good offer from Rajala Pro Shop. I now have the E-P2, which has essentially the same image quality as the E-P3, with the zoom 14-42 mm II, the longer zoom 40-150 mm and the electronic viewfinder EV-2. A small and light set, which weighs less than just the body of my EOS 60D DSLR.

After having eyed through the quick start guide I went out for a short walk in my neigbouring forest to try out the camera. I brought no tripod with me, in order to see how the image stabilization would work.

Though the back display is fixed, ground level shots are easy using the excellent EV-2, which can be angled straight up.


Builtin grainy BW filter.


The 150 mm end of the tele zoom (300 mm equivalent) seems usable, even though the 1/40 s exposure time is pushing the limits of the image stabilization. In-body image stabilization is considered inferior to optical image stabilization when the focal length is larger than 200 mm equivalent.


I took a quick detour when riding my bike to work the next morning and shot some ducks, again with a rather long exposure time.




Bracketing three pictures handheld for combining and tonemapping in Picturenaut seems to work fine even without a tripod.


The camera seems promising. Now I just have to read through the manual to learn to use it. There is a lot that could and should be customized.
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4 comments:

  1. Toni LundAugust 27, 2011 at 9:51 AM

    This seperate blog is great idea! I don't want to be a copycat again but I have to consider this myself, as photography was my primary hobby in the early 90s. Back then I liked a lot of B&W photography and I developed films and photos myself in my own little darkroom at home's bathroom. Those were exciting times!

    Now we are in the era of digital photographing, and it has opened new possibilities. One thing I have been thinking lately is the image quality between traditional film and digital photographing. I haven't had the time to research this but has digital surpassed traditional in image quality when using best possible equipment?

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  2. YetiAugust 27, 2011 at 10:51 AM

    I think for all practical aspects the image quality of digital cameras surpassed that of traditional film cameras several years ago. With a DSLR you can take photographs in low light situations that were just a dream ten years ago, lower ISO images are much cleaner than that of traditional film etc. The dynamic range might still be worse, but as a whole the technical image quality is a lot better nowadays in my opinion.

    Now, what to do with those thousands of slides in my archives...

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  3. Toni LundAugust 27, 2011 at 12:12 PM

    I'm thinking about converting some old paper photos to digital form, but the quality will suffer in the process...

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  4. YetiAugust 27, 2011 at 1:00 PM

    The quality will probably be quite poor. With a good scanner and paper photos made with real photographic reproduction before everything was digitized might be ok. The quality of paper photos went down rapidly when they just started scanning the negatives and printing them with photo printers.

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