I received E-1, 14-54 & FL-36 yesterday, bought via ebay.
The body is as good as I hoped for, even better. Ergonomics is great, a lot of buttons, high quality finish, very good viewfinder, really excellent grip and great shutter button. Camera is very configurable, too.
All in all, excellent body, full of features and of high quality. We all know that.
I'd write here about things I didn't like. Just my opinion as a very dedicated hobbyist.
Image review sucks big time! And not only the fact that it takes around 3 secs for preview to appear on the LCD and the famous lack of histogram in the preview. I dislike the Play mode as well, and quite a bit so. First, there are two Info modes - 1 & 2. Mode 1 is completely useless to me, except for the image number which should be in the image information, anyway. Mode 2 is the real thing, but requires button press and dial roll to switch between blinking highlights, histogram and image info. Very disappointing, 10D had all that on one screen. And, on top of that, you can zoom only in the Mode 1. That's plain stupid! Also, once zoomed, you can't switch to the next image, you have to zoom it out first. The result is that I have to fiddle with Info button and command dial like a maniac to see all the information I want just for the few images - press Info, roll, roll again, Info, Info, roll to zoom, roll to zoom out, next.. OK, it's 2 years old design, but it's worse than the prehistoric Canon D30.
I'm glad that Olympus fixed the most of this stuff in E-500, but I am disappointed they didn't do anything in firmware to at least enable zooming in Info mode 2..
I am puzzled why I didn't find about this more at this forum, usually comments stop at "no preview histogram".
It's overly complicated to delete the last shot. Needs 4 keypressing..
Focus points are not lit, harder to notice focus, especially after disabling the annoying Beep tone. Also, it's harder to change AF point and it could have had a few of them more too.
Flash EV compensation buried in the menu. I don't get this, why so? Yes, FL-36 has it, but it's not close enough.
When moving through menus, going back one level should've been done with Left arrow, not the Menu key, it'd be much more logical, to me at least.
Somehow strap always gets on my way in the portrait mode.
I don't like the position of the EV comp. button, but I configured back dial to serve for that, so it does not matter much.
RAW file size. OK, I am maybe overreacting, but as an engineer I am insulted with 2.5MB of pure garbage in those files because they even didn't perform the simple data packing.
Focusing is fast enough, 14-54 lens is really nicely built. Manual focusing by-wire is much better than I thought it'd be, I actually like it more and more. Viewfinder is excellent, so it's easy to judge right focus, or to do MF.
Images are, just as I expected, excellent. Flash pictures are miles ahead of 10D with 550EX. Both in exposure accuracy and in colour.
Images have just beautiful colour and tonality. Off course, I was often tweaking my 10D images in post-processing to have the similar look, but it took some time and wasn't always successful.
I have an impression (which complies with online tests) that 10D had more resolving power. But that's in the optimal case - with very good lens and with exact focus, and often one of this parameters was missing. E-1 gives me good enough resolution for A4 images, I'm quite sure, we'll see about those 30x45cm prints later.
Exposure and focus accuracy is much better than what I had with mine 10D, and that is really a big relieve.
Noise? OK, Let's talk about the noise. ISO 100 & 200 are clean, 400 is somewhat noisier than 10D, and 800 quite a bit more. But.. I tried to clean some E-1 images quickly through Noise Image. E-1 images response better and easier to NI NR, probably due to lack of stronger in-camera NR. Thanks to Adam-T for pointing out that previously. I quickly created my own profiles form imaging-resource examples (BIG public thanks to Dave Etchells) and just a quick pass of E-1 ISO 800 images showed at least as good results as 10D ISO 800 images, also passed through NI, but with more effort used on them. Haven't used ISO 1600 yet, I don't think I will, it seems better to use underexposed ISO 800 shot.
I can't talk much about for now the sensor cleaning or weather sealing, I didn't have a lot of problems with my Canons in both area. Those two things actually had very little in my decision.
It's interesting that I didn't choose E-1 because of weather sealing or embedded sensor cleaning, but because of ergonomics, image quality, lenses and, above all, price.
Financially, more-less, I traded 10D, Sigma 18-125 and 50/1.8 for E-1, 14-54 & FL-36. And I am sure I got much more for the same amount of money. 10D sensor has more resolution capability, but it requires more expensive lenses to use that potential. This Olympus setup gives better results for me, so far.
If I could afford to purchase 17-40/4L, 60/2.8 macro, extra flash and/or if I wasn't afraid of focusing problems with Sigma 18-50/2.8 it might have ended differently. But I couldn't...
Bottom line - after a first intensive day, I am quite satisfied with my purchase so far and I have no regrets about leaving Canon 10D for this camera. I am still not as sure about KM 7D, though.. I'll see in time.
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Greetings, Aleksandar
The body is as good as I hoped for, even better. Ergonomics is great, a lot of buttons, high quality finish, very good viewfinder, really excellent grip and great shutter button. Camera is very configurable, too.
All in all, excellent body, full of features and of high quality. We all know that.
I'd write here about things I didn't like. Just my opinion as a very dedicated hobbyist.
Image review sucks big time! And not only the fact that it takes around 3 secs for preview to appear on the LCD and the famous lack of histogram in the preview. I dislike the Play mode as well, and quite a bit so. First, there are two Info modes - 1 & 2. Mode 1 is completely useless to me, except for the image number which should be in the image information, anyway. Mode 2 is the real thing, but requires button press and dial roll to switch between blinking highlights, histogram and image info. Very disappointing, 10D had all that on one screen. And, on top of that, you can zoom only in the Mode 1. That's plain stupid! Also, once zoomed, you can't switch to the next image, you have to zoom it out first. The result is that I have to fiddle with Info button and command dial like a maniac to see all the information I want just for the few images - press Info, roll, roll again, Info, Info, roll to zoom, roll to zoom out, next.. OK, it's 2 years old design, but it's worse than the prehistoric Canon D30.
I'm glad that Olympus fixed the most of this stuff in E-500, but I am disappointed they didn't do anything in firmware to at least enable zooming in Info mode 2..
I am puzzled why I didn't find about this more at this forum, usually comments stop at "no preview histogram".
It's overly complicated to delete the last shot. Needs 4 keypressing..
Focus points are not lit, harder to notice focus, especially after disabling the annoying Beep tone. Also, it's harder to change AF point and it could have had a few of them more too.
Flash EV compensation buried in the menu. I don't get this, why so? Yes, FL-36 has it, but it's not close enough.
When moving through menus, going back one level should've been done with Left arrow, not the Menu key, it'd be much more logical, to me at least.
Somehow strap always gets on my way in the portrait mode.
I don't like the position of the EV comp. button, but I configured back dial to serve for that, so it does not matter much.
RAW file size. OK, I am maybe overreacting, but as an engineer I am insulted with 2.5MB of pure garbage in those files because they even didn't perform the simple data packing.
Focusing is fast enough, 14-54 lens is really nicely built. Manual focusing by-wire is much better than I thought it'd be, I actually like it more and more. Viewfinder is excellent, so it's easy to judge right focus, or to do MF.
Images are, just as I expected, excellent. Flash pictures are miles ahead of 10D with 550EX. Both in exposure accuracy and in colour.
Images have just beautiful colour and tonality. Off course, I was often tweaking my 10D images in post-processing to have the similar look, but it took some time and wasn't always successful.
I have an impression (which complies with online tests) that 10D had more resolving power. But that's in the optimal case - with very good lens and with exact focus, and often one of this parameters was missing. E-1 gives me good enough resolution for A4 images, I'm quite sure, we'll see about those 30x45cm prints later.
Exposure and focus accuracy is much better than what I had with mine 10D, and that is really a big relieve.
Noise? OK, Let's talk about the noise. ISO 100 & 200 are clean, 400 is somewhat noisier than 10D, and 800 quite a bit more. But.. I tried to clean some E-1 images quickly through Noise Image. E-1 images response better and easier to NI NR, probably due to lack of stronger in-camera NR. Thanks to Adam-T for pointing out that previously. I quickly created my own profiles form imaging-resource examples (BIG public thanks to Dave Etchells) and just a quick pass of E-1 ISO 800 images showed at least as good results as 10D ISO 800 images, also passed through NI, but with more effort used on them. Haven't used ISO 1600 yet, I don't think I will, it seems better to use underexposed ISO 800 shot.
I can't talk much about for now the sensor cleaning or weather sealing, I didn't have a lot of problems with my Canons in both area. Those two things actually had very little in my decision.
It's interesting that I didn't choose E-1 because of weather sealing or embedded sensor cleaning, but because of ergonomics, image quality, lenses and, above all, price.
Financially, more-less, I traded 10D, Sigma 18-125 and 50/1.8 for E-1, 14-54 & FL-36. And I am sure I got much more for the same amount of money. 10D sensor has more resolution capability, but it requires more expensive lenses to use that potential. This Olympus setup gives better results for me, so far.
If I could afford to purchase 17-40/4L, 60/2.8 macro, extra flash and/or if I wasn't afraid of focusing problems with Sigma 18-50/2.8 it might have ended differently. But I couldn't...
Bottom line - after a first intensive day, I am quite satisfied with my purchase so far and I have no regrets about leaving Canon 10D for this camera. I am still not as sure about KM 7D, though.. I'll see in time.
--
Greetings, Aleksandar
