Olympus E-30

Handling (6.00)

The camera has a pleasant heft behind its 23oz (without lens) weight, giving it a certain stability and solidity. It also has a good, deep grip to wrap your mitts around, so you won’t be dropping this camera because of a stiff breeze. The button layout is pretty good, though we found the rear dial placed just a tiny bit further away from our thumb’s natural resting position than we would have liked. The Delete button is also placed far from the right hand, making it impossible to erase bad images with only one hand. One other small problem is that when the USB cable was plugged into the back of the camera, it became difficult to press the down button on the four-way pad.

Buttons & Dials (8.00)

The control scheme on the E-30 is generally laid out well, and the buttons all feel highly resilient, as if they’ll take many, many presses without complaint.

In addition to buttons, toggles and dials, the E-30 has a couple of neat controls and options tucked away. The level gauge reads an acceleration sensor in two directions to let you know when your camera has a perfect level both vertically and horizontally. If you’re doing tripod work, or you don’t have access to a spirit level, this could come in handy. If you’re shooting in a setup where the vibrations must be kept to a minimum, the anti-shock option lets you set a time delay between the mirror being raised and the shutter released to stop any chance of motion. This can be set to between one and 30 seconds.

The E-30 also allows for a decent level of customization. The most evident is the Fn button, which can be set to face detection, one-touch white balance, test picture (takes a photo and shows it on the LCD, but doesn’t save), My Mode, Depth of Field preview, switch to a saved autofocus point, switch to manual focus, shoot in RAW, or show the level gauge. Unfortunately, the need to take manual white balance readings is usually far more pressing than the usefulness of these other features, and using the Fn button is the only way to take a white balance reading, so you’ll probably end up leaving it on that option the majority of the time. My Mode includes two groups of custom shooting settings that can be saved at a time, always a handy option. The camera can set the dials and focus ring to work in either direction, if you have a preference. There’s also an option to alter how long after pressing a control button that you have to change the related setting (if you hit ISO, for example, you have three seconds by default to alter the sensitivity level). In the custom menu, you can set this alternatively to five or eight seconds, or else hold, where you have to keep the button depressed in order to alter a setting.

Display(s) (6.90)

The big drawback of the E-30 screen is its comparatively low resolution. On a point-and-shoot, 2.7’ and 230,000 pixels may be fine, this pales in comparison to the Nikon D90’s and Canon 50D’s 920,000-dot displays. The one major LCD advantage this camera does offer, though, is the way the screen is articulated, pivoting out from the camera body horizontally and rotating vertically. Coupled with the decent Live View system, this is an especially worthwhile feature. The ability to frame shots at awkward angles, while holding the camera above your head, or without needing to keep your eye squashed against the viewfinder provides lots of shooting freedom, and represents one of the few hardware advantages Olympus holds over its competitors.

The LCD is one of Olympus’ HyperCrystal II screens, which allow some light to pass through the outer layer, then bounce back, providing greater brightness in sunlight. The brightness of the screen can be set to 15 levels, and the color balance can likewise be tweaked to 15 steps You can control what’s shown on the LCD using the info button.

When using the quick menu, a huge amount of information is displayed. By using the four-way controller, you can navigate to any icon on the lower half of the screen and alter that setting.

Secondary Display

The monochrome LCD on the top of the camera is much like that you’d see on any other mid-range SLR. It shows all the salient details of your current mode, or any shooting controls you’re currently altering.

Viewfinder (5.50)

The viewfinder isn’t going to blow anyone away on this machine. It provides a decent 98% field of view, at approximately 1.02x magnification. The diopter’s tucked away on the left side, and alters the focus from -3.0 to +1m^-1^.

The eyecup can be removed and replaced with other models, including a magnifier, available for purchase from Olympus. The compatible eyecups are the EP-5, 6 and 7. The EP-5 is the standard, the EP-6 and 7 are both larger and useful for people with glasses, and the magnifier is called the ME-1 (and will set you back around $40).

The E-30 also ships with an eye-piece cover, to prevent light leaks during long exposure work. Some higher end full-frame SLRs have a built-in iris to prevent any leakage, but it’s not something you generally find on a camera of this price point.

Image Stabilization (11.79)

The Olympus E-30 uses sensor-shift image stabilization technology to compensate for shaking hands. We test this by shaking the camera at high and low frequency, both in horizontal and vertical directions, using a precisely controlled laboratory mechanism. Lo and behold, the Olympus performed remarkably well. This may be one of the few benefits of having a small sensor, in that the camera can adjust it much faster to compensate for motion. More on how we test image stabilization.

The first of our tests simulates the amount of shaking that you might find when holding the camera in two hands, so there’s only a moderate amount of wobble. You can see that the camera is more effective horizontally across the slightly longer exposure as opposed to vertically, which is good, as horizontal shake is more prevalent when holding a camera. With both directions, the sharpness levels off around 1/60 and 1/30 of a second, a standard exposure level for indoor shooting. If you have the image stabilization on at this point, you get a sharpness approximately equivalent of a 1/200 exposure without image stabilization, a dramatic improvement.

With faster shaking, about the same as you would encounter when using the relatively hefty SLR one-handed, the improvement was even more noticeable, both horizontally and vertically.

What it boils down to is that the image stabilization on the E-30 is extremely effective. Regardless of the conditions you’re shooting in, or your exposure time, if you’re not using a tripod you will want to turn this feature on. Even at 1/500 of a second, where you usually won’t see any blurring, there’s still a noticeable improvement.

If you only want the camera to stabilize in one direction, for panning either left/right or up/down, you can set the image stabilization to level two or three. The former will only stabilize vertical shake, which makes it good for following objects moving parallel to the ground, and the latter only stabilizes horizontally, for targets rapidly ascending or descending.

If you are using Live View, holding down the IS button on the camera’s back will engage the stabilization motor so you can see a preview of how it will effect your image without actually needing to take the photograph. However, this also creates a slightly unnerving noise.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8

Where camera manufacturers Olympus, Sony and Pentax differ from Canon and Nikon, is that they offer their image stabilization in the body of the camera rather than the lens. This means that all lenses retain the benefits of shake reduction, and their prices can be kept lower. The Olympus mount system is known for being able to take other lenses with a simple adapter, so the E-30 lets you manually set the focal length of a non-Four Thirds lens, and the image stabilization will still work.