So - It is Tomorrow With Olympus - The New Body

Did goe last night to the Olympus product launch and was greatley amused.

Quett and Burke brought the new Olympus Pen camera - the E-P5 - to Western Australia and entertained and informed a roomful of Olympus fans at the Shoot Photography premises next door to our shop. A miserable wet night out and a brilliant fun one indoors.

The E-P5 is the newest evocation of the digital Pen line and as Quett pointed out, has brought a number of the memorable features of the OM-D camera to the Pen range. It brings the 5-axis stabilisation of the bigger camera into the smaller size - a very valuable feature if you are using the back screen as your viewfinder. It has a reconfigured two-wheel control layout that seems more familiar to DSLR users. It fires off the files with a rapid recording rate and then can share them easily with a built-in wifi.

The top shutter speed has been increased to 1/8000 second and the AF has also been speeded up. You can get your focus point and release the shutter with the touch screen on the back.

The camera body is accompanied by a new accessory viewfinder - the VF-4. This has double the resolution dots of the previous one and a greater magnification- it is the biggest view that you can get. I can attest that for the eyeglass wearer, all the screen is visible without shifting your head from side to side. Yay!

The little fun things buried in the menu now include a way to make multi-image panel assemblages in-camera - rather like album pages. With the ability to send your images to other people over their wifi networks, this would be a wonderful thing to do at parties or weddings. Of course there are 18 other special effects in there as well.

For myself, I was very impressed with the focus peaking feature when you looked at close-up subjects. It shows an enhanced outline of the places in the image that are in focus when you are using a manual lens - it takes out a great deal of the wonder and eyestrain with these subjects. If you elect to use auto-focus for macro work there is provision to reduce the size of the AF point considerably to allow it to be placed on small subjects.

The use of long exposures with the Bulb setting is also helped by the fact that you can watch the screen at the back and see the actual exposure build up both as an image and a histogram. Great for landscapers and astronomical photographers. Of course it does interval timing as well and makes little videos of it so go chase those stars...

And one final thought - the new E-P5 is being marketed from Olympus as a complete kit with the new viewfinder and a black example of the 17mm f:1.8 lens. Indeed, you can only get this black professional combination from pro Olympus dealers - not at furniture stores. The deal is very good indeed - you can save over $300 getting the kit vs getting the bits separately.

Come and talk to us and see the new camera.