Olympus Announces Pen E-P1 Comments

"So it's a bit expensive then"

... but look at it. the only thing that spoils the camera's gorgeous looks is all that silly text and adverts on this site. in fact, that whole page should be blank and just have the camera's picture on it.

if image quality is good enough, i'll make a note to pick one up. 600 of my hard earned pounds can happily go towards this rather than that silly iphone. /end rant.

I must have missed it; when did cameras become a fashion accessory?

@smc8788 - I associate cameras becoming fashion accessories with the emergence of the Olympus Mju range. When I first set eyes on the first Mju I thought it was the most stylish camera ever produced. The design is still attractive, but I'll never understand how this model looks good.

When it comes to style cameras like this and the Canon G10 look horrendous, yet because of the history and feature set, people call them attractive. It seems strange to me that as price points go up, compact cameras look increasingly ugly.

Come on guys - it's gorgeous! I had a Pen EE-3 1/2 frame for several years, and it was a wonderful little camera. It weighed a ton, and it was built like a tank, but looked very cute, and most of all took good photos at 72 per roll of film. This camera is clearly styled for people who hark back to simpler days of well-engineered point and shoot loveliness. I can't remotely afford one, but perhaps I'll wait a while until the price comes down ;-)

No built-in flash ?

Yup, no build-in flash. Fine by me, I try to avoid using the one on my compact whenever possible, anyway. If you want to take reasonable photos with a flash, you'll want to use an add-on flash, anyway.

This camera is to DSLRs what the Lumix LX3 is to compacts.

Agree re. flash. Bought g9 for wife as she can shoot raw in p mode - almost auto, I can process afterwards. Would love to replace the bulky and noisy g9 with this, but for social events where we'd use it, built in flash would have been very useful.

I'm not a fan of badly lit, available light images; would prefer direct flash. Plus won't pay over £100 extra for an accessory flash that can't bounce!

Even so, this seems a beautiful option. Could do with a 25mm pancake.

We'll have to see if the AF is usable. Panasonic didn't share their excellent contrast AF system from the G1 and GH1, and testing on (albeit pre-production) E-P1s found that the liveview AF on the olympus was abysmally slow, even slower than on compacts.

Let's hope Olympus has fixed that before launch.

Okay. Well there used to be this huge impenetrable barrier between compacts and SLR-class cameras. You could basically chose either to have horrible low-light performance -- among other things -- or to lug around a big SLR. Right, the barrier is still there, but cameras like the LX3, which I'm sure you'd agree is more than just a "large compact" on the one hand and Micro Four Thirds cams dropping the Reflex on the other, the barrier is getting smaller.

Re: Flash, maybe I'm doing something wrong then, but I've never had photos from my (aging) Lumix FX01 taken with a flash that weren't overexposed or terribly harsh in some other way; the same goes for all other compacts I have tried (not so many), and they never have manual correction of the flash, either.

Why not in black? I don't like the white one, not too keen on silver and I prefer unobtrusive black especially for street photography.

Sometimes you want just to carry a camera around and not need the extra bits to take pictures. I mean, my SB800 is nearly a big and heavy as my D70s so I quite often just carry the D70s on its own and only the SB800 when I know it's going to be really needed as the onboard flash is good enough.

Very interesting camera body, but Panasonic and Olympus are still deliberately crippling the Micro four thirds with the lack of a proper set of fast lenses. How about a basic-meat and-potatoes 18-50mm F2.8 lens for example? That would get sales going. if they were really serious, that should have been available at platform launch - it wasnt then and still isnt now!!

Cliff - when are you planning to review this - I've just put my plans to buy an LX3 on hold until I find out more.

I was also wondering if anyone knows whetehr Panasonic are planning something similar to this in the Micro 4/3 format? By all accounts their AF system is better than Olympus, so I wonder if they will be the people to watch?

Can't wait.....thanks for the update!