Olympus Pen E-PM1 12.3 MP CMOS Sensor Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom and 3″ LCD Screen (Brown)
- Fast Shutter Response. Never miss a shot again with the E-PM1’s Fast Shutter Response time of less than 60 milliseconds. The TruePic VI feature allows for reduced shot-to-shot time by shortening the black-out time between shots.
- Professional Audio Sound Capture. Take Videos that are able to capture uncompressed CD-quality 16bit/44.1kHz Linear PCM stereo recording or AC3 Dolby Digital audio.
- 12.3 MP with 3.0″ LCD Screen
- Face Detection with Eye Detect
- Full 1080 HD Video Shoot up to 29 minutes of 1080 60i HD Video and stereo sound in either AVCHD or AVI formats. A Direct HD Movie Button switches you from still to movie mode with just the press of a button.
The Small And Stylish Pen. The smallest and lightest PEN is available in six stylish colors – purple, pink, brown, white, silver and black – and features a new and simplified user interface as well as a streamlined button structure for superior ease-of-use. Its small size and portability make it the ideal camera to document life’s fun and spontaneous moments. Live Chat by LivePerson Ease-of-Use Simplified Control. Operating the camera is more intuitive with the newly designed user interface. The innovative screen activates popular menu options such as Art Filters, iAuto, Scene Modes, and Movie. The on-screen graphics have also been updated with a sleeker font design and an automatic pop-up guide in the menu screen. The E-PM1’s Live Guide system allows you to preview effects as you adjust them – before the image is even captured. Simply select Live Guide and turn the wheel on the back of the camera to slide through numerous photographic effects, such as brightness, color saturation, ton
List Price: $ 599.99
Price: $ 499.00
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5-star, great value!,
I’ve been using E-PM1 for a couple of weeks. It’s very nicely build and appears to be metal front, back or sides and the top (E-PL2 has only metal front panel). The menu is cleverly designed so you won’t miss the additional external controls all that much. Rec button and “right” & “down” buttons can be customized. E.g., you can set Rec button to serve as AEL/AFL, AF/MF switch, “Magnify”, “Tele-converter”, etc. In addition, if you turn off “keep WB warm” in the menu (it’s on by default), the colors will be much better especially indoors. Don’t forget to dial flash exposure compesation “+1EV” (the camera will remember this setting) for proper exposure because the bundled flash is always in semi-bounce position when activated.
Overall, great little camera with super fast AF (incl. continous AF in HD video), fast buffer clearing with a huge number of customizations available. 5.5fps burst mode and art filter bracketing is really cool. So far my basic settings: Noise filter off, “keep WB warm” off, Sharpening -1, Natural picture mode, right button – ISO, down button – WB, LSF jpeg, Rec button set as AF/MF switch, LCD set to max brightness. Also, don’t forget to enable SCP (Super control panel) by clicking OK, then pressing Info in live view mode. This will allow you a one-click access to all important settings for changes on the go. E-PM1 feels like a very thoroughly designed camera with well thought out menu. It does require some setting up to do initially for best resutls. It has a hot shoe and supports standard flashes as well as wireless flashes (with bundled flash attached). Buil-in Image stabilization is very effective especially with Panasonic 20mm lens you can easily shoot sharp pictures of non-moving objects at 1/10s w/o any blur. Priced at $499 it’s definately the best value for the money in the m43 format.
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|A few things that Olympus won’t tell you,
I’ve owned this camera for a few weeks now, so I just wanted write a few notes about this camera that get neglected.
1. The image stabilization is only good up to 4 fps, but the default multi shot modes are 5 fps or 3 fps. To get 4 fps, you have to use a custom menu setting.
2. Always shoot in multi shot mode. Single shot mode will cause camera lag (my guess is that it waits for the SD card to finish writing in single shot mode). This lowers your shot to shot times down to about 1.5 fps as the camera will just ignore your shutter press. Shooting in multi shot mode solves this problem, at the expense of not always seeing your next shot.
3. Buy the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens if you want to take any indoor shots without a flash. The kit lens, at f3.5, is just not fast enough indoors. Your shots will come out at 1600 ISO and contain blur or noise, depending upon your noise filtering setting, usually both, because f3.5, just doesn’t cut it. Okay, that might be a little harsh – if you reduce the photos down to 25% of their original size, they will be good enough to put up on a web page, but you wouldn’t want to print them. In comparison, the 20mm f1.7 lens takes great indoor shots.
4. Nearly all the pictures you see on websites that review this camera required custom menu settings. Custom menu settings require information from the manual before you figure them out. I must have played with the custom settings for a solid two hours with the manual by my side, before I got things close to the way I wanted them.
Edit (03-Oct-2011)
5. The auto focus speed using the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 lens is slower than with the 14-42 kit lens. While the 20mm focuses nearly instantly in bright light, it can take up to 2 seconds to focus in low light. Comparatively, the 14-42mm has a worst case focusing time of about half a second in low light.
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|My first micro four thirds camera,
This is my fourth camera purchase this year… yet this is the best one. My other three cameras were point-and-shoot cameras that gave me some good photos but in-door shots with high iso gave me very grainy images. Nikon P300 is pretty good with F1.8; however image sensor was little too small and that results in lower image quality in some occasion.
I also have Canon T1i which takes photos with really good image quality; however I run into the portability issue. I’m not as big of a photo enthusiast (I know… I just love buying new camera) and I do not feel comfortable carrying my Canon T1i everywhere. It is simply too bulky.
My definition of ‘perfect’ camera is one that I can take most everywhere and take photos with good image quality in every situation.
I did a lot of research for the ‘perfect’ camera, and I quickly came down to the following selections:
1) Sony NEX family – Sony NEX 3, 5, C3, 5N, and 7.
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These are wonderful camera. Small, and versatile, and especially with APS-C size image sensor, image quality (IQ) rivals regular dSLRs. However the limitations are the fact that they use Sony proprietary lenses and there are limited number of NEX lenses.
2) Samsung N100/N200
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These are similar to Sony NEX. I haven’t seen them in person; however these should deliver similar IQ with the APS-C size sensors. However they do have the same issue of using Samsung proprietary lens mount + format.
3) Nikon 1, Pentax Q, and Fujifilm X100
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Ok, Fujifilm X100 has APS-C size sensor; however it has a single fixed lens on the camera. Good lens, but you cannot replace lens. Nikon and Pentax recently announced their new compact system cameras, however their system uses smaller size sensor. Pentax uses even smaller and Nikon uses sensor about 1/2 of Micro Four Thirds. I like Nikon but I felt the lens collection + size sensor was disappointment at this time.
4) Then there are Micro Four Thirds cameras… these include Olympus e-P1,P2,P3, e-PL1,PL2,PL3, and e-PM1 and Panasonic GF1, GF2, and GF3, and other G series cameras.
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Micro Four Thirds cameras can use any lenses that adhere to the Micro Four Thirds standards. Therefore there are more lens selections available at the time of my research than any other compact system cameras.
My decision was more of my budget and my future direction… I want to build my lens library first; however I wanted to get best value for my budget. In my opinion, Olympus e-PM1 was the best choice.
My selection of Olympus E-PM1 was for its compact size and versatility of the camera. yes, it may not have all physical control buttons. That was problem when I was looking at the camera; however it’s not as bad as I thought. You can get to the settings quickly and you actually have control of most of settings that you can think of… And you can easily set your focus area, if you don’t want the camera to choose for you 🙂
Based on my research Olympus E-PM1 has pretty much the same hardware as more expensive and little bigger E-PL3. This means that it now has new dual core image processor (TruePic VI) and very fast auto-focus system. This all means that this Olympus E-PM1 is very responsive and good performer in everyday use.
It’s been about a week and I took almost 900 photos with single battery charge(battery life is good). I now have Panasonic 20mm F1.7 pancake lens on the camera and that one is really good for photo taking. (I won’t recommend it for video.. due to noise issue). With my F/1.7 lens, I haven’t really had need for a flash on the camera. In fact, I have not even tried it yet. Camera takes good IQ and very fast auto focus. I love how i can control so many settings on the camera. I don’t think I had this much fun with my Canon T1i.
NOTE: For Mac users out there, this ACHVD format on 1080i video would be little problem as there are no native support for the format yet.
Pros for Olympus E-PM1
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– Compact size (smaller than other micro four thirds)
– Good Image Quality (comparable to dSLRs)
– Fast auto focus speed
– large number of available lenses (micro four thirds)
– Available Hot Shoe; you can use external flash
Cons for Olympus E-PM1
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– no built-in flash (having something is better than nothing)
– not pocketable, unless you are talking about your winter jacket
– Limited availability of button control; it’s ok but for some this would be strong ‘con”
– Video format (ACHVD MTS format…
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