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.