Olympus E-P2 Compact System Camera (14-42mm lens & VF-2 electronic viewfinder) Black

Product Information

Hi, my name is Will Langlands. I’m a full-time gardener, amateur photographer and occasional scribbler. I live in Mid Argyll on the west coast of Scotland. Like the E-P1, a Movie AE menu allows you to shoot video in Program or Aperture Priority modes or with any of the Art Filters applied in real(ish) time (including the two new ones), but new to the E-P2 is a full Manual option. This allows you to fix the shutter speed and aperture as desired for more creative effects and is a welcome upgrade. In more recent history there are the remains of cleared and abandoned villages which stand as testament to turbulent times. The sadness and the atmosphere in these places is tangible and thought-provoking. The weather plays an important part in my inspiration as we can easily have four seasons in one day. Because of this, the light is constantly changing, which presents both challenges and opportunities. The LCD screen is bright enough in everything except direct sunlight, but as with that on the E-P1 is quite low res compared to much of the competition. Not to the point of being unpleasant, just not up to the current standard.

All of the sample images in this Review were taken using the 12.3 megapixel Super Fine JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 7Mb. Olympus launches E-P2 Micro Four Thirds camera". Digital Photography Review . Retrieved 22 November 2009. Behind a door on the right side of the E-P2 you’ll find what appear to be the same combined USB / TV output and mini HDMI port as the E-P1, but like many newer cameras the HDMI port has been upgraded here to support Consumer Electronics Control, or CEC for short. CEC allows the E-P2 to be controlled over HDMI by a compatible TV set, so you could use the TV’s remote to browse images and start slideshows.Olympus has gone the other way with the VF-2. This larger unit matches the 1440k dot resolution of the Lumix G1 and GH1 viewfinders, albeit with a smaller quoted magnification of 1.15x to the Panasonic’s 1.4x. 1440k dots correspond to 480k colour pixels, or an 800×600 grid. Like the Lumix G1 and GH1 before it, this allows the VF-2 to deliver a highly detailed image which is a joy to compose with, and which makes manual focusing much easier. The Olympus E-PL2 offers one continuous shooting option, rated at approximately 3fps; Olympus quotes around 12 Large Fine JPEGs or 10 RAW files. To put this to the test we fitted a formatted Lexar Professional 133x 8GB SDHC card, and fired-off 14 Large Fine JPEGs in five seconds before the camera began to slow; this corresponds to a rate of 2.8fps, and while the camera could keep shooting beyond 15 frames, it greatly slowed down. It is unfortunate that no lens hood is provided, but fortunate that the lens is very resistant to flare. It is also commendably free of distortion. At wide angles there is little distortion and only very mild pincushion creeps in as we zoom towards the telephoto end. What distortion there is is not readily visible in most images, even architectural subjects. The real strength of the Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras over their competitors (Panasonic) is that the bodies have built-in stabilization. This means that any lens used on the E-P2 is stabilized, including wide angles. Panasonic’s approach of putting stabilization in the lenses works just as well, but only of course if they have done so. Many of their medium and wide angle lenses are not stabilized. The camera’s Mode dial right on the top left of the chassis is a model of proper design. It is clearly visible, yet because the adjusting ring is buried underneath the top panel, with only an edge to be turned by thumb, it will never be accidentally mis-positioned. Kudos to Olympus for an elegant solution to a problem that all too many cameras have.

The control layout has been revised too, most notably by the addition of direct movie record and display magnification buttons - indeed overall it's now much more closely related to the E-PL line than the older E-P models. As is the Olympus way the camera's controls are remarkably customisable - no fewer than five buttons can now have their functions defined by the user. All of the goodies that Olympus introduced in the E-PLs have also found their way across - ranging the beginner-friendly 'Live Guide' control and iEnhance colour mode, through to the ability to display user-configurable shadow and highlight clipping warnings in live view. The Olympus E-P2 features the same movie modes as the E-P1 with the choice of either 640×480 (VGA) or 1280×720 (720p HD) video recorded at 30fps and encoded using the Motion JPEG format then stored in an AVI wrapper. As before you’re looking at about approximately 1MB per second of footage in the HD mode, with each clip limited to a maximum file size of 2GB; Olympus estimates this will get you around seven minutes of HD footage or 14 minutes in the VGA mode. You can see two examples of the HD movie mode below using the 17mm pancake lens; the first clip was handheld and in fully automatic with stabilisation enabled. All the top panel controls are neatly positioned on the recessed right side. The surface then slopes upward, levelling off to accommodate the hot shoe and behind it the updated PEN accessory port which supports the optional viewfinders, the MAL-1 macro light and Penpal PP-1 Bluetooth transmitter. The mono mic is positioned to the right of the hotshoe, at the point where the top panel levels off. On the extreme left is the pop-up flash, activated by a mechanical switch on the rear. The top surface is finished in the same textured plastic as the hand grip and, like everything about the E-PL2, is evocative of the kind of quality that’s more often associated with the analogue era. The E-P1 managed to fit most of the company's excellent E-620 DSLR into a comparatively small, beautifully styled metal case in a way that appealed to far beyond the camera-geek demographic. It was not without its problems, however - the main one being its autofocus system that was rather sluggish when compared to Panasonic's G-series. Also its control system, inherited wholesale from the E-System Four Thirds DSLRs, didn't always perfectly translate to the way its buttons are laid out (The newer, simpler E-PL1 and firmware updated Panasonics make this more apparent than it was at the time of review). Like the E-PL1, the Live Control menu allows you to shoot video in Program, Aperture Priority or fully manual modes or with any of the six Art Filters. As on other PEN models, though, shooting movies with the more intensive Art Filters will greatly reduce the frame rate with jerky results.The Olympus E-P2 lets you dial in shutter speeds of up to 60 seconds and has a Bulb mode as well for exposure times as long as 30 minutes, which is very good news if you are seriously interested in night photography. The shot below was taken using a shutter speed of 1/6th seconds at ISO 1600. We've included a 100% crop to show what the quality is like. Following the accessory port, the other enhancements to the E-P2 over the E-P1 are more modest, although still useful. Arguably the most important of them concerns improvements to the autofocus, at least in terms of capabilities if not actual speed. The dynamic range of the camera is also very satisfactory. Highlight detail is well held while even the darkest shadows reveal texture and detail. This far surpasses what is possible with film. In very bright sunlight it will be useful to use the built in flash as a fill light for portraiture. This will reduce the intensity of any shadows on the face and will result in more flattering daylight portraits. Fill in flash can of course also be used for a range of other subjects, including perhaps flower and plant photography.

In addition, the E-P3 has a 614,000 dot OLED screen that is touch-sensitive. This particular panel uses Samsung's Pentile dot layout to give VGA-equivalent resolution, coupled with capacitance-type touch technology similar to the Apple iPhone. The touch screen can be used to set the focus point and optionally fire the shutter, and can operate some of the camera's other functions too. Crucially though this is always in addition to the rest of the camera's controls, rather than attempting to replace them. If you decide such features don't have a place on such a traditional-looking camera, they can be disabled with no overall loss of functionality. EVFs are not yet as good as the better SLR viewfinders, but quite honestly, when compared to the small and dim DSLR viewfinders found on many of the lower-end cameras today, the one on the E-P2 has a lot to recommend it.Because of the way viewfinders are measured (using a fixed lens, rather than a lens of equivalent magnification), you also need to take the sensor size into account, so the numbers in the diagram below are the manufacturer's specified magnifications divided by the respective 'crop factors'. As you can see, the VF-2's 1.15x magnification (0.58x once crop factor is taken into account), makes it bigger than most APS-C cameras and equal to largest optical viewfinder that Olympus makes - that of the high-end E-3 DSLR. In the PASM exposure modes available shutter speeds range from 60 to 1/4000 plus Bulb, which can be used conventionally or set between one and thirty minutes using a timer. Exposure control in PASM modes is via the control dial, using the top position to switch to aperture settings once the shutter speed has been set in Manual mode. The E-PL2 forgoes the scalar readouts favoured by Panasonic on the GF2 and Sony on the NEX-3/5 in favour of an unadorned numeric display with the currently active setting highlighted in yellow. As with its predecessor and other cameras in the E-series with Art or ‘Magic' filters, these digital effects are applied at the time of capture which means write speeds are inevitably a couple of seconds longer than for regular images. When shooting using certain filters, such as the new Diorama, the screen's refresh rate slows dramatically providing a jerkily relayed image as the camera struggles to provide a preview of how the eventual image may look. Rather than try to follow this we found it best just to take the shot and delete any experiments we weren't happy with - we weren't wasting film after all.