Olympus Pen E-P1 compact camera can do fancy tricks
— -- It's not a digital SLR.
It's not a point-and-shoot.
And it certainly is not a pen!
Olympus' new Pen E-P1 camera is a nostalgic beauty, reminiscent of classic cameras from the 1960s, but with all the digital bells and whistles of modern technology. It represents a brand-new camera format — "micro four thirds" — developed by Olympus and Panasonic. Basically, it lets compact cameras behave more like expensive SLRs.
Love point-and-shoot cameras but wish you could use interchangeable lenses and accessory flashes? That's the point of the Pen E-P1, as well as Panasonic's recently released Lumix GH1.
They can handle cool SLR features, such as shooting in RAW, which is an uncompressed image that can be finely tuned. And they can shoot high-definition video with better quality than competitors', such as Pure Digital's Flip or most consumer video camcorders.
Panasonic's micro four thirds cameras came out first, starting with last year's Lumix G1. Olympus was a little late to the game, introducing the Pen in July. Not that the wait is hurting the company. Olympus reports that the Pen E-P1 is back-ordered at most stores but says it continues to ship them.
To make sophisticated cameras smaller, the companies eliminated the mirror used on digital SLRs to view images through an optical viewfinder. Instead, you must compose and focus a shot on the camera's LCD screen, as with a point-and-shoot. That's fine for indoor shooting. But in bright outdoor sun, it's hard to see the screen.
(Panasonic's cameras do have an electronic viewfinder, which essentially offers a video rendering of what you're looking at, rather than the accurate color view of an optical viewfinder.)
The good news is that the image sensor — the most important part of the guts of the camera, which helps determine the ultimate quality — is dramatically larger in micro four thirds cameras than in point-and-shoots.
The 12-megapixel E-P1 sells for $799 with a small zoom lens (equivalent to 35 mm to 75 mm in film-camera lingo). That's about on par with what you'd get from entry-level digital SLRs such as the Canon Digital Rebel EOS T1i or Nikon D5000, which start at $750 and $729, respectively.
Related Stories
ABC News Live