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Mark Pinder, a long-time Olympus fan who had to go with Canon DSLRs a few years ago (since there really wasn’t anything else competitive at the time) recently reviewed the Olympus E-3 over at Luminous Landscape.

Sadly for Olympus, it’s not a very good review. Luminous Landscape always does a good job of telling you what it’s like to actually use a reviewed camera in the real world, as opposed to shooting resolution charts under studio lighting. The E-3 sounds like a better match for a studio camera than an outdoors, real world camera.

First, the good:

The AF in optimal conditions with the SWD lenses is fast, and I have no doubts to contradict Olympus’s claims regarding the speed. The image quality and colour at the lower ISO’s is absolutely gorgeous and I do actually think that the two Olympus Zuiko Digital lenses I have are very possibly the sharpest zoom lenses I have ever used on any digital SLR period, they are astoundingly good. The SWD dust filter appears to work as advertised too in that in the 4 months of ownership, I have not had to clean my sensor once, an almost weekly occurrence with my old Canon’s.

The minor negatives that Mark discusses are poor placement of the rear control dial, and the lack of a flash exposure lock feature.

But then he gets into two more serious issues.

The first is poor image quality at high ISOs, giving you a banding effect in the image that is much more difficult to deal with in post-processing than your typical luminance and chroma noise:

The Olympus is vastly superior to my old Canon’s when it comes to comparing chroma, (colour blotch), noise at high ISO’s, but while software such as Noise Ninja can solve chroma noise problems very well, the kind of banding noise inherent in higher ISO Olympus files cannot be fixed.

The banding issue starts to show itself quite badly at lower ISO’s too, (especially in the blue and red channels), on even moderately short time exposures, even when dark frame subtraction is used. Dark frame subtraction is pretty much compulsory for any exposures longer than a second or two. Whereas Canons from the 10D onwards, and current crop Nikons can be used for extended time exposures without DFS and still supply eminently high quality files, the same cannot be said of the Olympus.

The second major issue he discusses is autofocus performance under challenging conditions, but conditions where decent AF performance is expected in a modern digital SLR. Notably, the continuous AF mode seems pretty unusable, and AF performance at long focal lengths is reportedly subpar.

He also goes off on a bit of a rant about the “insane pricing” of their top-of-the-line lenses, blowing away the prices of comparable Canon lenses. In the end, he finds that the Olympus E-3 just has too many negatives to recommend it:

In conclusion, I really do want to like this camera. I understand that the 4/3 sensor provides engineering issues over the larger sensors, but whilst Canon and especially Nikon are providing ISO’s in their reduced sensor cameras that are eminently usable at 3200 or even up to 6400 ISO (in the case of Nikon’s D300), I would really like it if Olympus could engineer a camera which was capable, (image quality wise across the board), of matching my EOS 30D, which goes back a generation of model development. 6400 ISO would be nice, but for me, the IQ and functionality of digital reached a point I was happy with several years ago, and the Olympus just does not reach this.

So, aside from possibly leaking information about the Nikon D3X, what else is in the 1.10 firmware update for the Nikon D3? Let’s take a look.

• A “Vignette Control” item has been added to the “Shooting Menu”.
• A focus point brightness item has been added to the “a6: Focus point illumination” setting in the “Autofocus” category in the “Custom Settings”.
• The “Highlights” playback display option has been moved from “Display mode > Basic photo info > Highlights” in the playback menu to “Display Mode > Detailed photo info > Highlights”.
• When shutter speed and/or aperture are locked when shooting in LiveView mode, using the “L” (command lock) button, an “L” icon is now displayed in the camera monitor.
• The size and color of “Demo” displayed in the monitor with playback, when “No memory card?” in the “Custom Settings” is set to “Enable Release”, have been modified.
• The range of settings available for “ISO sensitivity settings > ISO sensitivity auto control > Minimum shutter speed” in the Shooting Menu has been increased from 1/250th – 1s to 1/4000s – 1s.
• When a compatible Speedlight or Wireless Speedlight Commander is used, the AF assist illuminator now lights regardless of focal length.
• When shooting in hand-held LiveView mode and the frame is magnified prior to autofocusing, operation has been modified so that display returns to the magnified display rather than full-frame display.
• Improved white balance calculation for shutter speeds around 1/4 sec in P and A modes.
• When attempting to crop images at an aspect ratio of 4:3 using the “Trim” option in the “Retouch” menu, the cropped image did not have an accurate 4:3 aspect ratio. Oops. Glad to hear that it really does what it claims to do now.

There you go. Like the Nikon site says, be sure to upgrade both the A and B firmwares to 1.10, or else “proper operation of your D3 is not guaranteed.” Scary!

Apparently, if you go hunting around in the new Nikon D3 1.10 firmware for interesting text strings, you’ll find a few mentions of a D3X, and resolutions listed in the firmware that are higher than what existing Nikons can reach (for example, 6048×4032, which gives you 24.4 megapixels.)

The natural assumption is that a 24 megapixel Nikon D3X will be released in the near future, and use a similar firmware base, which would explain how those strings wound up in the D3 firmware. Another theory is that the 24 megapixel sensor has been put into D3 bodies for testing purposes, and those testers are using the stock Nikon D3 firmware. I would think you could just build a special firmware for those test cameras in that case, and not leak the D3X info in the D3’s firmware. Who knows.

Definitely far from definite, but it’s a quasi-official — if unintended — mention of a Nikon D3X, so it seems worth mentioning.

UPDATE, December 1, 2008: And today, more than half a year later, Nikon officially announced the D3x, although they somehow claim that it’s 24.5 megapixels, when really you have to round up to get to 24.4. That extra 0.1 megapixel will surely make all the difference in sales.

I’ve been reading up on long zooms because I’m considering buying one (something that goes up to 300mm or so.) I found one discussion thread comparing the Sigma 70-300 APO and the Tamron 70-300 Di, which kept talking about PF.

Now, I’ve been around camera discussions for a while, but somehow never encountered PF in any reviews before. It took a fair amount of Googling to find the answer, so I’ll just post it here in case that helps anyone else.

PF is just Purple Fringing. CA (chromatic aberration) is the more common term for that in lens reviews, but purple fringing is certainly descriptive, since that’s what you’ll see. It’s probably more accurate as well, since chromatic aberration should really encompass all kinds of image problems, even if the term is now pretty synonymous with purple fringing.

For the record, it sounds like the Tamron lens has more purple issues than the Sigma, although people seem to be fairly evenly distributed between which lens they prefer. Some find the Tamron sharper, others find the Sigma sharper. My reading of that is that, for my uses, I’m probably fine with either of them, and it probably depends more on the individual copy of the lens than on consistent differences between the two brands.

I think I’m slowly moving up the price ladder. I noticed that the Canon 75-300 III (USM or not) was available pretty cheaply used, and thought about it. But the Sigma APO version isn’t much more, and apparently gives you a pretty big bump in quality. Just in case anyone else was wondering, or was trying to research the Canon, or just trying to figure out PF.