Olympus PEN EP-1 – A camera to love

01. Apr, 2010 Comments Off

I have never gotten so excited about a camera before. This is the Olympus Pen E-P1 camera, part of the Olympus PEN series. It’s retro old school look (based on the old PEN series which started in 1959) reveals the innovative slim profile new standard called Micro Four Thirds System. It’s like a traditional digital SLR, minus the mirror box system, allowing it’s smaller slimmer profile.

This is the closest you can get to SLR type control, in a compact size. They actually mean it this time, full ISO and shutter speed controls, plus – it even has a manual focus ring.

My uncle had an old Olympus that looked like this, and I always thought it looked so cool. Now I can have it, in its 12 megapixel glory. Just look at the damn thing, is it not the most beautiful camera you’ve ever seen?

Of course it comes with special creative modes, 6 art filters, some of which give that toy-camera effect – which don’t look half bad. It also does HD video and Olympus has released a ton of different lenses and accessories for it, so you can spend endless dollars on it. One cool thing worth mentioning, is since the Micro Four-Thirds is an open standard, it means the EP-1 is compatible with Micro Four-Thirds lenses from other companies like Panasonic.

There’s a ton of reviews on this camera, but for the most comprehensive review check out DPreview.

To see what this camera is capable of see the flickr group and the competition entries.