dslr.ws

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.

I’m never sure what the real name of steves-digicams.com is. The web page title for the Olympus E-3 review says “Steves Digicams”. The graphic at the top of the pages says “Steve’s DigiCams” (note the added apostrophe and CamelCase). The copyright notice at the bottom is “Steve’s Digicam Online, Inc.”

Who knows. Whoever they are, they’ve recently posted a review of the new Olympus E-3 digital SLR. As with all of their reviews, the actual review starts on the “Conclusions” page, so I’ve linked you there.

They find that the performance of the E-3 is much improved over the sluggish Olympus E-1:

From power-on till the first image was captured measured 6/10 of second , while “wake-up” to image capture measured approx. 2/10 of a second. Shutter lag, the delay between depressing the shutter and capturing the image, was almost instantaneous at less than 1/10 of a second when pre-focused, and 3/10 second including auto focus time for a high-contrast subject. Shot-to-shot delay averaged 2/10 of a second. Continuous Shooting mode captured 22 shots in only 4 seconds and required 20 seconds to write all the images to CF card. The E-3 can continue to capture additional frames at 6/10 second intervals while saving to the memory card. Using the internal flash, the shot to shot interval was 3/10 of a second. In RAW mode, I was able to capture 15 images in 2.9 seconds before the camera slowed down to approximately 1 frame every 4/10 of a second with a full buffer. The above times were observed using a Lexar Media Professional 1GB 80X compactflash memory card, Zuiko Digital ED 12-60mm (24-120mm) 1:2.8-4.0 SWD lens, flash off, daylight lighting, 3648×2736 JPEG, SHQ quality. Times will vary depending on lighting conditions, media used, camera settings, etc.

Image quality is reported as being good, and similar to the Olympus E-510, although the auto white balance was off on a shot taken in diffused morning sunlight, giving it a too-blue color cast. Other shots in “ambient light” had an “unpleasant yellow” hue.

In the end, the brief review states that it’s a good camera:

Bottom line – Priced at a MSRP of $1,699, there’s a lot to like about the E-3 (and the Olympus lens and accessory system). The camera produced excellent shots and is quite responsive. Much improved shooting performance (over the E-1), superb image quality and the combination of image stabilization and anti-dust technology makes the E-3 a challenger in the heavyweight professional camera market. This is a professional dSLR, but the balanced handling and logical controls will make the E-3 attractive to any photographer ready to step up to a durable, pro-level camera system.

Sure, I’m a couple of days late on this one, but what would you rather have: late DSLR camera news, or carnivorous otters eating your face off? See, it’s not so bad to get your camera news a little late.

So, anyway, Olympus has announced the Olympus E-3 DSLR, to be available in November 2007 along with some new lenses. The important bits of information, all in a neatly formatted list:

• 10.1 megapixel sensor
• In-camera image stabilization with a claimed 5 EV of exposure improvement
• “Dual-axis flexible-angle” 2.5 inch LCD with live view (meaning an articulated, swing-out LCD)
• 5 fps high speed burst shooting speed
• 11 point AF system, all of which are double cross-type — two horizontal and vertical lines for each AF point, which is something I haven’t heard of before
• Shutter speeds up to 1/8000 sec
• Splashproof sealing of major parts, including the flash, LCD monitor, and switches
• Dual memory card slots, one CompactFlash and one xD
• High resolution LCD (230,000 pixels)
• Automatic Dust reduction system

The list price will be $1699 for the body only. Sounds like an interesting camera, I look forward to reading some reviews and avoiding the killer otters.

Olympus has also said that they hope to get 20% of the digital SLR camera market over the next five years. That would be an impressive gain, given the current market shares of the big players:

Canon held a 46.7 percent share in the global digital SLR camera market in 2006, followed by Nikon with 33 percent, Sony with 6.2 percent and Olympus with 5.9 percent, according to research firm IDC.

I guess someone remind me to check up on them in 2012 and see how they’re doing.