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Yes,  I had become used to haul my kilogram heavy D300 with me nearly everywhere I went, with the occasional luxury to not take the 1.5 kg tele lens along as well… but secretly hoping there would be something small, light,  and pocketable with great manual control, without sacrificing image quality of course.

When mid-2010 the Panasonic Lumix LX5 was announced, I thought I had finally found my “carry everywhere with me” camera – but when I saw its price tag (close to 500€), I was quite shocked. Sorry, folks, that is just too much.

Being thrown off-course with my decision for the LX5 already made, I had to look again at alternatives without much hope, but then a miracle happened – I met the Olympus E-P1 (aka Pen).

Love at first touch!

Sure, I had had a longer look at it before (and actually had preferred the Panasonic Lumix GF-1 from the test reports and features over the P1), but what had happened since then was the introduction of the E-P2, sending the price of the original tumbling down: The kit with the neat collapsible 14-42 lens came down from 800€  to 360€ – substantially less than the LX5. I thought once, twice, and ordered one – and I will not give it back!

For those not regularly updating themselves about new toys and gear (hopefully being focused on making pictures instead) – the E-P1 is the first of a series of bodies for a new lens mount in the so called “micro four thirds” format, also written as Micro 4/3 or MFT. It is a mirror-less system camera with a sensor not quite the size of the APS-C of e.g. the consumer DSLRs, but with a crop factor of 2. So the 14-42 lens effectively feels like a 28-84 mm. I won’t go into detail here, find all the techie details and test images as usual on dpreview here.

Here are some test images I took on last year’s Munich Oktoberfest. For pixel peeping, you might click on the download link giving you 100%.

[svgallery name="octoberfest-hd"]

My conclusions from half a year of use, with about 2500 photos shot with the Pen:

• The Pen is not pocketable. You need either a bag or a backpack. I have found a good solution to keep the bulkiness low is to add a retro wrapping casing like the Delamax case available at Amazon.
• Still I like to carry it along – the first days I had it in my smallest DSLR case, and anxiously kept checking that I hadn’t lost it because the bag felt empty with the Pen in it instead of the D300.
• The image quality is similar or better than my Nikon D300 up to ISO 800. It’s as simple as that.
• I totally, totally love the built-in electronic 2-axis spirit level, and use it as my default composition view. Horizons come out straight, and architecture photography with wide angle finally works also hand-held!
• It obviously does quite some image enhancements in terms of lens distortion and vignetting, saving you some time in post production. I do not feel it is overdoing it, but like the result.
• Controls and dials are ok, but not great. Don’t try it with gloves in winter…
• The screen is awful when the sun is out.
• The autofocus in low light sucks. Even in good light it is not fast, but that is not a problem with my typical walk-around subjects (no flying ducks there).
• It has no flash, only a shoe mount for one. Ok, no chance to take embarrassing flash-only images. But also no chance for those (few) subtly fill-flashed images profiting from a pop-up flash. I can live without it.

Summary: The Olympus Pen is a really nice package and a joy to use, despite the few drawbacks, of which the most serious is the screen usage in bright sunshine. But don’t overrate that – you still can take photographs, and normally your subject is in it

Some questions I ponder on:

• Can it completely replace the D300? Certainly not. Without the DSLR’s fast autofocus and continuous shooting speed, wildlife and birds are impossible. Same I would say for shots involving off-camera flash or even studio and macro setups. I might be wrong.
• Does it sometimes replace the D300? Certainly. Actually, ergh, more and more. If I know I will not be looking for wildlife or birds with my tele zoom but rather do “walk-around landscape”, e. g. hiking, I am completely comfortable taking only the Pen with it’s built-in image stabilizer and electronic spirit-bubble.
• Could I use something even smaller? Well, yes, but I still have a 7-year old Canon Ixus 40 (with a tiny 4 mega-pixel sensor). In the last half year I think I preferred it twice over the Pen, and both for “family-life” photography only, for which the 4 mega-pixels were ok.
• Will I expand the Pen into a “system” with exchangeable lenses, flash, and maybe other bodies? Hard to say. The Pen is fun to use, and I use it more and more… Panasonic now makes a 100-300 mm 4.0-5.6 MFT lens which is only 12,6 cm long, and weighs 500 grams. Not bad for 600 mm equivalent reach. Do they make tele converters for that ?

Here is a family portrait to show the difference in size in “travel” mode:

By the way, the E-P1 Pen is still available – I saw the body for 200€ today. Of course there is now the E-P2 with its electronic viewfinder, and the E-PL1 and E-PL2 models (those targeting the consumer with less manual control needs) – but I think still the original is incredible value for money.