Gadgetory

the olympus pen ep-1 and it's one of the best micro four-thirds models that I've tested thus far it's got a more refined design improved feature set better photo quality and faster performance it comes in two kits one with just the body and another with the big but nice electronic viewfinder and a very good 17 millimeter f-18 lens and this camera really needs a good lens the body is heavier than before but that accommodates the new tilting touchscreen display along with the Wi-Fi antenna Olympus's Wi-Fi implementation uses a novel approach for setup with a QR code that you scan with a fairly basic device app I had some setup issues with it during testing though hopefully Olympus will be able to fix them quickly overall I really liked the shooting design it's reasonably customizable with a lever that toggles extra settings dependent upon your shooting mode the grips rather shallow but it has a nice large thumb rest which makes it comfortable for single-handed shooting the touchscreen display operation is a little more limited than you usually find you only really is it for camera settings when in auto mode in more manual modes it generally serves for touch focus touch shutter scrolling through images during playback and so on do find the navigation control annoying though it's too small and imprecise which means for example that I'll hit left when I wanted to hit down and I do wish the flash could tilt back for bouncing its autofocus shooting and image processing we're all quite fast though it's got some of the usual pulsing issues with continuous auto focus during video the addition of peaking is nice for manual focus except it doesn't operate in video mode low ISO sensitivity image quality is very good as well with clean JPEGs through about ISO 400 and usable through ISO 800 you might want to shoot RAW above that because high sensitivity JPEGs get pretty mushy videos just ok with the usual edge artifacts vp5 is a really nice camera with great performance and a streamlined design but for the same money I think some aps-c interchangeable lens models deliver better photo quality I'm Laurie grinning and this is the Olympus PEN