Olympus PEN E-PL1

Sharpness

Sharpness scores for the E-PL1 far exceeded any of the other cameras in our test group, with measurements of 2026 lw/ph horizontally and 2284 lw/ph vertically at the center of the lens at the widest setting.

Sharpness suffers at the widest focal length with the lens stopped down to f/22, but outside of this extreme results are very good. As expected, chromatic aberration is most visible at the widest lens setting.

The softness at f/22 is less noticeable in the midrange, with lower chromatic aberration. And at the other apertures results are tack-sharp from edge to edge.

There’s a trace of chromatic aberration, but overall sharpness holds up very well with the lens at its full telephoto setting. More on how we test sharpness.

Image Sharpness and Chromatic Aberration

Focal Length:

14.0mm

27.0mm

42.0mm

Click blue squares to change sample crops below
f/3.5 f/9 f/22
f/4.6 f/10 f/22
f/5.6 f/11 f/22

Image Stabilization (6.30)

We test the effectiveness of image stabilization systems by mounting the camera in a computer-controlled rig that produces repeatedable movement patterns and shooting a test chart at a range of shutter speeds, first with a low level of shake, then with a high level. In the case of the E-PL1, the in-camera stabilzation didn’t have much effect when the camera wasn’t moving much, but produced substantially sharper images at all tested shutter speeds when the camera was shaken more aggressively.

In addition to simply turning image stabilization on and off, you can select I.S. 2 mode, which only compensates for vertical shake to ensure smooth horizontal panning, or I.S. 3, which dampens horizontal shake when panning vertically. If you’re not shooting with a Micro Four Thirds lens, you can manually enter focal length information to tune image stabilization performance.

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

As seen in the chart below, the E-PL1 image stabilization system stacks up well against the other cameras in our comparison group, with only its brand mate E-P1 posting superior results.