I happened to be in London today, and dropped into a camera store or two to see if they had the Olympus E-P1. They did, however, the kit I was interested in – namely the pancake lens and viewfinder – was not shipping for a couple of weeks. I popped into the next store, Jessops, and lo and behold there was a rep from Olympus there with one of each of the kits letting people try them out. Score!

So, I promptly went over and had about 10 minutes having a go with it and listening to the spiel. The external viewfinder was nice enough, just like a classic viewfinder on rangefinders, so a dumb viewfinder, not displaying any settings or info, that’s ok i wasn’t really expecting it would. Right, I thought,  lets look at Manual Focus, it’s a compact sized camera with (finally!) a decent MF ring on the lens, cool, no focus markings on it which is a shame, ok…so lets look at the rear screen to see if i can see a gauge of where it is focusing and work from there? No.

That’s right, no. As a camera it has a very natural way to manual focus, a focus ring on the lens barrel, yet cripples you from actually doing so by making it automatically jump into a zoomed in “liveview” of the middle of the scene when you touch the focus ring. Therefore you only see the central point, and not the whole scene.  What the hell? This is forcing you to always focus recompose (not so good if you are shooting wide open) or fiddle with the controls to move your zoomed in view around the scene…making for a not very quick method of working. Plus in my mind it’s the wrong way round, you should compose then focus as you are doing that, not sort of compose, then manual focus then have to recompose unless, of course,  you want everything placed centrally all the time… what the hell were they thinking?

To add even more insult to injury, you can’t turn this feature off, it will always zoom in when you try and manual focus, always. There is also no visual readout on the rear screen (such as there is on several compacts) of where you are focusing, so you can not set your hyperfocal distance and shoot away using the viewfinder. Which, incidentally, effectively renders the viewfinder totally superfluous, as if you use it you are leaving all the focusing up to the camera and forcing yourself to chimp all the time after the moment has passed to see if you got it. Hello Olympus! Can you say decisive moment!?  If you do try to use the viewfinder and set up your focal point manually, using an object at a known distance, and know that a/any given f-stop you’ll have a certain amount of DOF, that’s all well and good until you accidentally knock the MF ring. As there are no external references on the lens barrel to tell you where it is focused,  you’ll not know it has moved. So unless you keep checking regularly your focus could be way off.

To his credit the Olympus rep looked a bit sheepish when i queried the MF usage and how it is insanely limiting, so thank you Olympus you have spared me from buying into the Micro 4/3s system, which was something i had thought would have been inevitable when this olympus was first rumoured, on paper it had so much going for it: compact, larger than normal sensor, interchangeable lenses and fast (ish) primes. Once again it would seem that camera manufacturers don’t love photography.

Hmmm maybe it will be that leica M8 after all…Damn, better get saving.

Oh, and for all those saying “use the screen” don’t get me started on that…

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