Wiyum
Established
I stopped by B&H today to have a look at the E-P1, and I have a few quick impressions and one more drawn-out, perhaps shallow impression.
First of all, pictures fail to demonstrate how tiny this thing is. The body is perhaps the size I expected, maybe a bit smaller, but that zoom lens, which struck me in pictures as big enough to seem "too big" is really a small thing. Zooms aren't really my thing, but I could see myself wanting to have this around for travel.
Second, I found AF speed to be as I'd read: "just slower than I'd ideally want."
Third, I wasn't bothered by the resolution of the LCD. I expected to be, and I'd been shooting for hours with my D700, in part to condition my expectations in a negative way when I went into B&H. It just didn't bother me, even composing off of it. I was a touch surprised.
Shot-to-shot times were pretty great, all told, and with prefocusing, I found the camera to have "virtually" no shutter lag.
Finally, I found the manual mode to be nearly unusable with my large hands. This is only somewhat an issue for me, because I almost always work in aperture priority mode, but for those times when I need manual, I had problems. Let me explain: I expected to really like the spinning wheel to control iris while the dial controlled shutter, as I often used my old Canon 20d this way and I still miss that wheel on my D700. What I failed to realize is that the wheel is actually attached to the four-way controller, so if you move your finger to the wheel to make an adjustment, and do so with any force, you activate one of the four options (ISO, AF, WB, self timer), changing what is affected by the scrolling of the wheel. I attended to this, tried to correct it in my handling, got a bit better, finished testing the other things I wanted to see, and ended my tests by going back to that: still a problem for me. This is possibly something that would get better with practice, but perhaps not. Really, it was such a problem for me, I was surprised I hadn't read about it yet. Anyone with me on this?
I obviously can't speak to IQ based on this test (though I'm getting the impression that the files look pretty great), but with the one (large) exception, I really liked the feel of the camera. Time will tell if it is something I can overlook.
The guy at B&H said they expect the 17mm kit to arrive "any day now."
First of all, pictures fail to demonstrate how tiny this thing is. The body is perhaps the size I expected, maybe a bit smaller, but that zoom lens, which struck me in pictures as big enough to seem "too big" is really a small thing. Zooms aren't really my thing, but I could see myself wanting to have this around for travel.
Second, I found AF speed to be as I'd read: "just slower than I'd ideally want."
Third, I wasn't bothered by the resolution of the LCD. I expected to be, and I'd been shooting for hours with my D700, in part to condition my expectations in a negative way when I went into B&H. It just didn't bother me, even composing off of it. I was a touch surprised.
Shot-to-shot times were pretty great, all told, and with prefocusing, I found the camera to have "virtually" no shutter lag.
Finally, I found the manual mode to be nearly unusable with my large hands. This is only somewhat an issue for me, because I almost always work in aperture priority mode, but for those times when I need manual, I had problems. Let me explain: I expected to really like the spinning wheel to control iris while the dial controlled shutter, as I often used my old Canon 20d this way and I still miss that wheel on my D700. What I failed to realize is that the wheel is actually attached to the four-way controller, so if you move your finger to the wheel to make an adjustment, and do so with any force, you activate one of the four options (ISO, AF, WB, self timer), changing what is affected by the scrolling of the wheel. I attended to this, tried to correct it in my handling, got a bit better, finished testing the other things I wanted to see, and ended my tests by going back to that: still a problem for me. This is possibly something that would get better with practice, but perhaps not. Really, it was such a problem for me, I was surprised I hadn't read about it yet. Anyone with me on this?
I obviously can't speak to IQ based on this test (though I'm getting the impression that the files look pretty great), but with the one (large) exception, I really liked the feel of the camera. Time will tell if it is something I can overlook.
The guy at B&H said they expect the 17mm kit to arrive "any day now."