The fun factor

The Olympus E-P2 certainly has the hard to define fun factor. It is like riding a fat bike: it might not always make sense, but it sure is fun. The system is light and small enough that it doesn't feel stupid to bring it for a bicycle ride, stopping for a photo session, and the continuing the ride.

I decided to see how the camera would cope with fast moving animals, something that it should be a lot weaker at than the EOS 60D. It was fairly dark in the forest, necessitating the use of ISO 800 and still getting only shutter times between 1/50 and 1/20 at f5.6, the maximum aperture of the 40-150 mm lens at 150 mm the (300 mm equivalent) end. Most of the pictures where unsharp due to the squirrels moving too fast, but at least the image stabilization seemed to work quite well. Still this camera is not the best choice for action photography. The electronic viewfinder (I had the EV-2 with me) is slower than a pure optical viewfinder. It might only be a 40-50 ms delay, but it is still there. The autofocus, on the other hand, is quite fast, despite the early reviews complaining about it being slow. The new lenses and firmware have obviously improved the matter a lot.









Orpine (Hylotelephium telephium maximum)


An aspiring oak.


The berries of the lily of the valley. They are very poisonous. This is the only photo where I used a tripod.


Exploring a fallen tree. The 14-42 mm Mk II lens focuses fairly close, but I wouldn't mind it focusing even closer.






I'm still very satisfied with the system. I think it is very possible that these new mirrorless systems might replace the traditional DSLR cameras for most purposes, though it will still probably take years.