Olympus E-30

Shooting Modes

For the shooting modes, the usual suspects are all here: Manual, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, Program Shift, and Auto.

Focus

The Olympus E-30 uses TTL contrast detection for focusing, when not in Live View. It has 11 focal points, shown below. The focal point can be set to any one of these, the entire range, or a cross of five points. If there’s one setup you find yourself using frequently, you can set this as the ‘home’ autofocus point, which the camera will default to. In low light situations, the flash functions as an autofocus assist lamp by firing a brief burst of light. This illuminates very well, but is incredibly distracting for any candid shots you may be attempting to make.

If your lenses are causing you trouble, and not focusing quite right, the E-30 can store autofocus microadjustments for up to twenty registered lenses.

There are five focus modes available, in combination between auto and manual.

Recording Options

One of the features Olympus is really pushing on the E-30 is the vast array of image sizes and shapes, as they’ve adopted a number of aspect ratios beyond their maximum 4:3. The E-30 can additionally be set to 3:2, 16:9, 6:6, 5:4, 7:6, 6:5, 7:5, or 3:4. If you’re using Live View, the image on the LCD will be cropped to the appropriate proportion, but not if you use the viewfinder.

In 4:3 ratio, the E-30 lets you chose which resolutions you want to assign to Medium and Small image sizes, as well as any of four compression levels (superfine, fine, normal and basic). Four combination of image sizes and compression levels can be bookmarked, and then can easily be selected through the quick menu.

Other Controls (0.00)

While shooting, the camera can inject two types of digital effects. The first is accessed in Panorama mode, located in the Scene Modes menu, and only works with Olympus xD cards. In this mode, you chose a direction to pan, and then snap a series of shots, which can then be stitched together using Olympus software. The problem with this is that there’s no image overlay to show you where your previous shot ended, and this functionality can easily be replicated with third party software.

The second is multiple exposures, which overlays two, three or four images over one another to create a composite. You can set the gain to either auto (which turns the brightness to 1/n, where n is the number of frames) or full. This editing can also be done in Playback with previously taken images, as long as they’re RAW files.