New Olympus EP-2 & Lens Road Map
First Impressions
First let me say this – Today I got in the mail the E-P2, so I will be posting info as I can this week. But today outside of taking it out of the box, I haven’t had any real chance to play with it. Really I am glad to see the EVF, and the external mic jack, so I am very excited to take this camera out and play with it. (But today Katie Grandmother feel sick, and was rushed to the hospital. So I was left with the boys)
Anyhow my first few impressions if you don’t have an E-P1 yet, this might have enough new features such as the new C-AF mode, and EVF in particular to swing you to buy an E-P2. I can’t wait to play with this tomorrow.
The new black finish is also very nice, I thought that I wouldn’t care for it, but really it is done very well, and I think that it should make a nice addition to the µ4/3 line. Remember to keep your eyes posted, because this camera should be a big Christmas seller. Olympus is also announcing a 14-150mm and the 9-18mm lenses – I am not really impressed with 10x zoom lenses, but an ultra wide angle is always of interest to me. At PMA this year in my interview, Olympus also hinted at a telephoto coming early next year. So I am glad to see that between Panasonic and Olympus a lot of growth is happening, I think that the growth of the µ4/3 will spur on further development for the 4/3 line of cameras, especially since they share the same sized sensor. But for many it is never fast enough.
Having the camera on camera stores shelves by Christmas is a very good move in my opinion, and I believe that it will be on the wish list of many this holiday season.
New Features of the E-P2
Before everyone says that the E-P1 is just a new colored E-P1 I think it would be good to look at the differences between the 2 cameras.
EVF – Electric Viewfinder
These numbers are from the specs of the camera, the best EVF that I have seen is on the G1, but I still had a few issues with it, however, a EVF is 100% better in my opinion than no viewfinder (and with zoom lenses, I don’t see how a optical VF would work.) This EVF is very bright – 400 cd (vs 200), the contrast is very high 300:1 (vs 100:1) It provides a 100% field of view (as it should) with 1440k dots. It has a 1.15x magnification (same as the E-3 which helps to manually focus a lot in my opinion). All in all I will give more on my opinion but this is very promising. Also the EVF will provide a diopter adjustment, and has brightness & hue adjustments.
External Microphone jack
You can also use the accessory port with an external microphone jack, which should be quite helpful to record sound.
AF Tracking in C-AF and Movie mode
To help improved the overall C-AF mode, it will lock onto an object and keep that object in focus. I will play with this tomorrow and we will see.
2 new Art Filters –
Diorama and Cross Process, which will also work in movie mode. I will try this again tomorrow.
Full manual control in movie mode –
This is needed and should provide some nice effects.
New HDTV control – Playback-Pause, play, fast forward, etc. which is controlled by the TV remote.
IEnhance – new picture mode in which the camera detects the dominate color in the scene and selectively increases the brightness/saturation wherever that color exists within the image area so that the scene better resembles what the human eye detects.
All in all a few important new features but I don’t have a ton more info than that. Again over the next week I will play with the camera, and also start a thread for a Q&A with Olympus over these new features.
Olympus hasn’t made any big claims about the sensor, so I will see if I can notice any differences between the two cameras.
