My early review of the E-P3

I like it. A lot. It fits very well into a 'sweet spot' intersection of size and image quality.

I mean, you can play around with megapixels and sensitivity and 100% crops at ISO 12,800 and maybe have a few good NEX vs. μ4/3 flamewars on the internet. But I'm quite pleased with my E-P3 so far. And I'm writing this as somebody who's been watching the market develop and finally decided to get a new camera, not somebody who gets excited about comparing ten different cameras at 100% crop to figure which one has the best noise pattern. Mostly, I don't have a NEX to compare against.

The way I see things, if you want the pinnacle of image quality, you will use a view camera, either with a 645 digital back, a 4x5 scanning back, or a piece of 4x5 film. Down from there, the full-frame digital offerings from Canon and Nikon offer respectably good resolution but you'll end up carrying a bunch of gear. Same with medium format film rangefinders. My RB67 is not in a great point of the size vs. image quality chart compared to the Mamiya 7, but that's fine. And then you get the standard dSLR bodies. The E-P3 is going to be smaller than a dSLR system and has some disadvantages, but it's a new sweet spot, being between a larger compact P&S (Say a G-series Canon) but smaller than a dSLR. And it really does feel and look smaller than a dSLR.

I went on one photo stroll, took some random snapshots, and set up a studio session with a professional model with my new E-P3. Now, clearly I'll tell you how I really think after I've owned it for a few months... but here's what I'm thinking right now.

I was a bit hesitant about the touchscreen UI and, for that matter, Olympus didn't actually dive all of the way in with the E-P3 and touchscreens to much as quietly danced towards. It's still a button-based camera, however, parts of the user interface touch-enabled. If you don't like the touchscreen, it can just be disabled and your camera works exactly like previous digital cameras. But I do like the touchscreen. See, in most cameras, you can either manual focus, trust the camera to pick the correct point to focus on for you, or there's some sort of a dial or joystick to let you pick a point. And, in the last mode, it's always awkward to pick a spot. So the nice part about the touchscreen is that you can set it up such that you touch the screen and it will ensure that the spot you just touched is in focus and then take a picture.

I also like, although it's not the default, the Super Control mode. Pretty much, the standard menu for shooting option is off to the side of the screen and requires you to scroll through. The Super Control mode just displays it in a blob through the center of the screen where you can use the arrows to navigate and the wheel to adjust. It's so much better than the standard UI.

It has the cheesy 'Art effect' and 'Scene' modes, but the camera doesn't use up most of the mode dial on fancy modes, there's just one stop for "Art" and one stop for "Scene". The iAUTO mode uses the touch screen more often and offers tweaks to the shot... in fact I think the iAUTO mode is the sort of controllable non-expert UI that actually helps the amateur instead of confuses them. I would not hesitate to hand my E-P3 to somebody else and ask them to take my picture and worry too much about what they were doing and I think a lot of the 'I don't want to understand apertures and stops and ISOs' crowd will come to love the way the iAUTO UI turns the photographic triangle into tweakable sliders that let you dial up the degree of background blur or dial up the level with which the camera freezes action.

I think the biggest comment about the autofocus is that it's not flawless. It either focuses blindlingly fast or it hunts for a bit. It usually hunts in lower light situations and I think that I prefer manual focus in a studio setting. At least part of this is that I need to spend a bit more time getting really used to the autofocus system and how to use the servo-AF + MF modes. And, to be fair, I've seen this happen with cameras that have dedicated AF sensors as well.

In no way do I feel slowed down by the camera. It feels really quite snappy, especially in terms of how fast it updates the LCD. There have been some points where I needed to read the manual to understand why it was doing something. I think that, most of the time, it's actually that the camera is doing a better job of UI than before and I'm just too used to the old way.

I like the compactness. The camera body is sufficiently small, the kit zoom lens collapses, and there's a decent assortment of pancake lenses for the system. Availability of lenses suited to the unique properties of the system is one area where the μ4/3 system wins over both the Sony NEX and Samsung NX systems... if I wanted large lenses, I'd get a large camera to go with them. There are several different pancake lenses from both Olympus and Panasonic at different focal lengths, two nice collapsible kit zoom lenses, and even a pancake zoom lens from Panasonic. This is better than all competing systems.

It's a 12 megapixel camera and, at the native ISO 200, it's giving you every last megapixel. I'm not spotting huge amounts of noise or smearing or anything. The only thing I've noticed at 100% crops is that my adapted Canon FD prime lenses are slightly out-resolving the kit zoom lens, but it's something that only the sort of people who photograph test charts instead of things would really be annoyed by.

At ISO 800-1,600, it's surprisingly usable. I've got some random test shots where I shot at 1/5th of a second handheld at ISO 1,000 and between the IS and decent noise performance, it's barely noticeable that I shot with only a low-wattage compact fluorescent for illumination because I was too lazy to drag out my strobes.

And I'd consider even the ISO 12,800 results to be fairly reasonable. Not in the sort of thing where you could print an 16x20 and walk right up to it and not see noise or smearing... but it looks good enough for a snapshot. dSLRs from a few years ago were this noisy at ISO 3200.

I think the biggest impact, really, of the smaller sensor is that it's not great for minute-long long exposures. It feels a bit worse than most of the APS-C sensor cameras I've used... although I probably need to do some further experimentation.

I like that it has a built-in flash. I mean, the low-light performance is good enough that I can see not needing to use the 'dragging the shutter' trick I used to use on my G7, but it is useful for filling in shadows and triggering slave flashes. I've already used it for that.

Now, the happy side note, which I alluded to previously, is that the μ4/3 distance between lens mount and sensor allows you to adapt all sorts of lenses that didn't previously work. For example, I've got a bunch of gear that uses the Canon FD mount. None of the SLR systems have room to accommodate FD mount lenses... but the μ4/3 mount does. So I got a cheap $20 adapter off of Amazon and started using my lenses. It is, by the way, a bit weird because I know my FD lenses by the feel of the lens barrel in my hands and I keep trying to put the non-existent viewfinder against my eyes or use buttons that just aren't there.

But this totally provides me with a lot of justification to buy up more FD mount lenses because they are now dual-purpose instead of just single purpose.

And, from a aesthetics perspective, I got the black body and I'm quite fond of how nice it looks with both the new kit zoom lens and with my old FD-gear. It's not so intentionally retro as to look retro... but it's also got the ageless appeal of the old half-frame PEN system.

I had a bit of consternation with the provided Olympus Viewer and RAW conversion. I thought that it was incredibly noisy at ISO 200... then I realized it was just that the software was providing a quick preview instead of fully computing the image. Easy enough to get past. I'm still pondering if I should go for one of the higher-end RAW converters like DxO, start using Lightroom, or what. I'm not sure if Adobe is going to be releasing a CS4 update to Camera RAW, which would then mean I'd have to go the DNG route, or.... meh.

As far as accessories go, I already got a lens hood for the kit zoom lens, an OP/TECH SLR Wrist Strap, a spare battery, and a LowePro APEX 110 AW case. I didn't bother putting the grip on, so as to make it smaller.

The APEX 110 case has plenty of room, which probably means I'll get a smaller camera pouch in the near future so I can put it in my bike trunk bag without worrying about it clanking against something sharp. But the APEX makes for a good case to hold the camera + 1-2 small lenses + battery.

I'm probably going to buy a pancake lens. It just plain makes too much sense. I kinda wanted some sort of default zoom lens so I got the kit zoom, but with the pancake lens, it really is the sort of size that can be slipped into a very small space.

Overall, if you look at the E-P3 as a camera for somebody who really cares about photography, who may even already own a dSLR system or some film gear, but wants something that takes that comfortable hardcore photographic experience and shrinks it, you understand the intended audience and how Olympus has really catered to that audience.

The wife has been somewhat bugging me to replace the G7 for quite some time now. See, her old compact camera was stolen, so she doesn't actually have her 'own' camera. So, she inherits the G7 now.

There was some consternation caused because she accidentally had the G7's charger in her suitcase when she left on Friday, the E-P3 was due on Monday, and I was supposed to have a model over on Sunday. And I didn't want to purchase a new charger for the G7's batteries because, while the G7 will still be used, the benefits of a new charger are fairly minimal for the money at this point in time. Unfortunately, the model, according to her public twitter stream, decided that she wanted to smoke pot with her friends instead of show up for a shoot, so all of that consternation was for nothing. This is what San Francisco Nudes calls 'Kelp' and it's somewhat an unavoidable part of shooting. I mean, I'm sure at least some of the time that's what models have chosen to do instead of show up, but it was unusual to actually have it confirmed.

Coincidentally, Bad Charlotte, who is a well-established model, messaged me trying to scare up modelling gigs for her most recent trip to SF. And so I decided it was more fun to work with an established model with a long history of showing up and posing well than deal with such silliness and had a great shoot with her.

I mean, after all, it's nice to start a new camera off on the right foot. If it has a delicate personality that is offended by women in fishnets, it's better to know within the return window instead of after, isn't it?