Olympus PEN E-PL1

Buttons & Dials

There are significant changes here compared to the E-P1 and E-P2. The vertically mounted control wheel is gone, along with the left hand control dial, with their functions taken over by the four-way controller. It’s not a disaster, but it’s a notable downgrade, making adjustments slower and less convenient. For manually adjusting shutter speed and aperture priority, the new system is a clumsy kludge, as outlined here. For most operations, though, the trade-offs are acceptable. And we are happy to see the dedicated movie button, especially since it can be programmed to take over some of the functions previously only assignable to the overworked Fn button.

Picture Modes

The Olympus Picture Mode system combines color control with contrast, sharpness, gradation (an unusual term for dynamic range adjustment) and saturation. There are six preset picture mode settings, shown below with our samples and Olympus’ descriptions.

The i-Enhance option, introduced with the E-P2, bears a bit more explanation. What happens is, the camera analyzes the scene to determine the predominant colors and boosts the saturation only for those shades, leaving the rest of the photo unaffected. The effect is most noticeable if you’re shooting a scene with a single strong color presence — a grove of leafy trees, for example, or a row of brick buildings.

In addition to the six presets, you can also create a custom picture mode by altering the parameters of an existing mode. For the color modes, this means adjusting contrast, sharpness and saturation to one of five levels. Gradation can be set to auto, normal, high key or low key. For the i-Enhance mode, the effect can be set to standard, high or low. The monotone mode has different image parameters, combining contrast and sharpness and gradation adjustment with picture tone (neutral, sepia, blue, purple or green) and a virtual black and white filter, in neutral, yellow, orange, red or green. These work like filters used with black and white film: yellow, for example, enhances the white clouds in a blue sky, while green emphasizes red tones and green leaves. The customized settings are retained when you turn the camera off and on, but you can’t store more than one customized picture mode.

Two images can be combined using the in-camera multiple exposure capability. If you’re shooting two sequential images, the first one is shown on screen as you line up the second, which is a huge help. You can also use an existing shot, stored in RAW format, as one of the two exposures. In addition to letting you keep a bank of component multiple exposure parts on your memory card, this also means you can combine more than two frames in a multiple exposure, by saving a multiple exposure as a RAW file and using that as an overlay for additional images.

While you don’t have fine control over the gain level of each image, you can set the camera to auto gain, which sets each image in the combination to 1/2 brightness, or turn auto gain off to use each image at its original brightness.

Picture Effect Samples
i-Enhance Vivid Natural Muted Portrait Monotone More...

In-Camera Editing

The generosity in providing multiple playback views contrasts with the stinginess of available in-camera editing options. With JPEGs, you can resize, rotate, crop and change the aspect ratio, create black and white or sepia copies, fix red-eye and use shadow adjust to brighten a backlit subject. There’s also an e-Portrait option that ‘makes the skin look smooth and translucent,’ according to the manual. In our trial run, it blurred blemishes and facial lines a bit while adding image noise — nobody said beauty comes cheap.

JPEG copies of RAW images can be saved, applying the current camera settings, which is a fairly clumsy way of handling this task.

The one fun editing feature is the image overlay function, which lets you combine up to three RAW files to create a composite image, with control over the relative brightness (gain) of each. Saving the result as a RAW file lets you add even more images to your composition.

There is no movie editing or trimming option, so you’re stuck with that inevitable jerky camera movement that happens when you press the button to start and stop recording a clip.

You can also record an audio snippet (up to 30 seconds) and store it with a photo. This can be useful if you want to audibly ‘jot down’ information about your photo (the address where it was shot, for example), though it would be even better if you had the option to make the recording while taking the picture.

Menu

Like the Olympus E-P1 and EP-2, the E-PL1 employs a three-part menu strategy. There’s the standard full-screen tabbed menu for infrequently changed settings, a live control menu that overlays the right and bottom screen edges with key settings while shooting, and the enthusiastically named ‘super control panel’ which overlays the entire Live View screen with shooting settings that can be adjusted.

When shooting stills in program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority manual or iAuto modes, the live control menu (shown below) includes settings for picture mode, white balance, drive mode/self-timer, image stabilization, aspect ratio, image format and size, flash mode, flash compensation, metering mode, autofocus mode, face detection and ISO.

Changes you make to picture mode, white balance, aspect ratio and metering mode are all previewed on-screen, a helpful feature.

The live control and super control panel (see below) are not available in art filter or scene modes.

While the live control panel puts many settings at your fingertips, there’s an even more complete option available. pressing INFO switches from live control to the enthusiastically named super control panel, which covers most of the screen and lets you adjust just about every shooting setting without delving into the main menu system. We found using the super control panel became our main shooting strategy, since it not only let us make lots of adjustments easily, but also showed most of the current camera settings at a glance.

Finally, the full-screen menu system is used for less frequently changed settings, such as image stabilization and bracketing, and for customizing camera operations. There are five menu sections, two for recording, one for playback, one for function customization and one for rarely changed camera settings. the organization isn’t bad, but the use of icons instead of text for some choices is potentially confusing, and there are options which aren’t visible on-screen until you’ve scrolled down to reveal them, never a good design choice.

The live control menu.	The Custom Menu.

Instruction Manual

Olympus delivers a 124-page manual that looks fine, has lots of nice charts and diagrams, and gets the basic points across well enough. Unfortunately, the distinctive camera features that may confuse even knowledgeable photographers are given painfully short shrift. There’s a camera setting for ‘gradation.’ What’s that, you ask? Here is the user guide explanation, in its entirety: ‘Adjust tone (gradation).’ (Turns out its dynamic range adjustment processing, but you’d have to be clairvoyant, or talk directly to the folks at Olympus, to have a clue.) The Art Filter system is a concept requiring a bit of explanation — it gets half a bit here. Wondering what that i-Enhance picture mode does? ‘Produces more impressive-looking pictures matched to the scene mode.’ Adda set of intimidating LCD diagrams in the ‘basic’ up-front section with 56 callouts between them, inadequate explanations for your playback mode options and a barely-there index and you have a document sorely in need of a skilled editor. To see for yourself, you can download a copy in PDF format here. At least that way, you can use search instead of struggling with the index.