Olympus E-30

Buttons & Dials

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.

Picture Styles

With this camera, Olympus have pulled a number of features from their point-and-shoots, in a move to make new SLR users feel more at home. This has resulted in a number of so called ‘picture effects’, which covers color modes (what Olympus calls Picture Styles), the E-30s Art Filters, and two rather interesting shooting tools. But first, the Picture Styles.

Art Filters

Art modes are different from Scene modes, in that they act like filters over the image to substantially change your picture. Some Scene modes are on the mode dial, and some are accessible in Art/Scene mode, while all the Art Filters are only reachable in Art/Scene mode. Some of the Art Filters are effects that would be easy to replicate in Photoshop (Pop Art and Pin hole spring to mind), but soft focus and grainy film would be a little harder and can create nice effects.

To give a feel for what all these Art Filters look like, Mr. Jerusalem was kind enough to pose for photographs in each. Click on the image for full size versions, but be warned, these are large.

In-Camera Editing

While no replacement for a computer and a competent user of Photoshop, the E-30 has some basic editing tools built in, and one slightly unusual one. For the standard suspects, there’s shadow adjust for dark images, red-eye fix, cropping, black and white and sepia modes and saturation adjustment. The image can also be resized or cropped to one of the multitude of aspect ratios supported by this camera (4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 6:6, 5:4, 7:6, 6:5, 7:5, or 3:4). The interesting editing feature is image overlay (which can also be done while shooting if you don’t want to stack images after you’re done shooting). Using RAW files, up to four pictures can be overlaid on one another, with the gain manually shifted from 0.1 to 2.0. If you want to overlay more than four images, just create two separate composites, and then combine the resulting files.

Menu

The menu system has a series of tabs running along the left side, each of which offers a page or two of options, some of which lead to even further choices. It’s not a bad menu system, but the lists can be a bit long, so getting to the desired choice can be a chore. The system would also benefit from a higher-resolution screen, which would make the menu sharper, but it’s still reasonably bright and easy to read.

Instruction Manual

The Olympus E-30s manual is pretty decent. It’s well laid out with clear illustrations and a good table of contents and index. Where it fell short was adequately explaining some of the features (like gradation), and in placing the table of contents after the basic guide, so you have to hunt for the contents page before you can start looking for what you really need.

If you’re looking for more information, Olympus has a series of online tutorials for their SLRs at Olympus Digital School. There aren’t any specifically for the E-30 yet, but there are some good general lessons on the site (though a few border on advertorial).