Zuiko Digital Specific Lenses With the E-1 body, Olympus introduced four Zuiko Digital Specific lenses (Zuiko means “Light of the Gods,” according to the Olympus literature) and a 1.4X tele-converter, providing focal lengths (35mm film-camera equivalent) from 28mm to 840mm. The E-1’s 17.3x13.0mm image sensor results in a 2X “crop” factor: any lens used on the E-1 produces the cropping of a lens twice its focal length on a 35mm camera. Thus, the 14–54mm f/2.8–3.5 Zuiko Digital Zoom lens provided with our test camera gives the framing of a 28–108mm zoom on a 35mm SLR, the 50–200mm f/2.8–3.5 provides the framing of a 100–400mm lens on a 35mm SLR, the 50mm f/2.0 macro the framing of a 100mm, and the 300mm f/2.8 telephoto the framing of a 600mm. Think about that: a 600mm f/2.8 supertele (which becomes an 840mm f/4 with the 1.4X tele-converter)! All the E-1’s lenses are quite fast for their focal lengths. And the 14–54mm focuses down to 8.67 inches at all focal lengths—close enough to produce a 1¼2-life-size image on the sensor, equivalent to 1:1 with a 35mm camera—a real macro zoom that doesn’t even have the word “macro” in its name! Highly cropped image portion shows excellent detail. Photo by Mike Stensvold Besides being “designed for digital,” Zuiko Digital lenses are “smart”—they communicate with the E-1 body and store data in the header portion of the image file that enables firmware- and software-assisted correction of such things as edge shading and barrel and pin-cushion distortion with wide-angle and wide-range zoom lenses. And the user can upgrade the firmware when new versions come out merely by connecting the camera to an Internet-connected computer via USB 2.0 or FireWire (IEEE 1394) cable and clicking a button. Lens quality is pretty amazing. Olympus states that if the front element of the 300mm f/2.8 lens were the size of a large baseball stadium, the amount of deviation in the surface would be less than the thickness of a human hair. All elements are multi-coated. Exposure This is a pro camera, so it doesn’t have any point-and-shoot-oriented subject programs (portrait, close-up, landscape, etc.). What it does have is just what any serious photographer will love: a simple dial that directly sets P (shiftable program AE), A (aperture-priority AE), S (shutter-priority AE) or M (metered-manual exposure control). Three metering modes are provided: multi-segment Digital ESP, center-weighted average, and 2% spot. Digital ESP handles most scenes well. Spot metering gives the knowledgeable user total control over exposure. ISOs from 100–800 can be set by pressing the ISO button and rotating the main or sub dial until the desired number appears on the LCD panel. ISOs of 1600 and 3200 can be accessed via the LCD monitor menus—but as is the case with film, the higher ISOs are best used only when really necessary, because image quality does suffer. Exposure compensation (±5 EV, settable in 1¼3-, 1¼2- or full-EV increments), automatic exposure bracketing (3 or 5 frames, settable in the same steps, can be used in conjunction with exposure compensation) and AE lock (coupled with or independent of AF lock) add exposure versatility. Sharp images with a wide tonal range make the E-1 a very good camera for landscape photos. Photo by Mark Garten More Features Shutter speeds, via a computerized focal-plane shutter, range from 60 seconds to 1¼4000, plus B (for exposures up to 8 minutes). You can activate the camera’s built-in fixed-pattern noise reduction feature (via the LCD monitor menus) to minimize “noise” in long-exposure shots. There’s also a noise filter (also accessed via the LCD monitor menus) that reduces random-pattern noise that occurs at high ISO speeds (most obvious in large solid areas such as skies and skin). Both noise reducers increase shooting time, as they do their thing after exposure, but they are quite effective. Four drive modes are accessed by pressing the drive button and rotating the main or sub dial until the desired icon appears on the LCD panel: single-frame shooting, sequential shooting (up to 12 frames at 3 fps), self-timer (fires the camera after a 2- or 12-second delay), and remote control (used with the optional remote control). The default automatic white balance setting delivered good results in most circumstances (it adjusts so that a white or near-white object in the scene is white—if there is no such object in the scene, it can be fooled). We generally used manual settings of 5300 K and 6000 K, which gave results similar to using daylight-balanced slide films. There are manual settings from 3000–7500 K, plus custom one-touch white balance (fill the frame with a white sheet of paper and press the one-touch WB button—you can save up to four one-touch white-balance settings). You can, via the LCD monitor menus, activate WB bracketing, which shoots three images with different white-balance settings—handy when you have doubts about the lighting color. There are adjustments for sharpness, contrast and saturation (we found the defaults to be quite good), and shading compensation, which brightens the edges of images shot with wide-angle lenses to minimize vignetting. You can also choose between standard sRGB color space and the wider-gamut Adobe RGB (popular with photographers who shoot for publication). The camera prefixes sRGB images with a P, and Adobe RGB images with a _. You can set the camera to display the just-shot image for 2, 5 or 20 seconds after exposure, or not at all (we liked the default 2-second option). In playback mode, you can display single images, or 4, 9 or 16 at a time, magnify an image to check details, or display several levels of data with the image including a histogram and a visual indication of overexposed highlight areas. There’s also a slide-show mode that plays back images in succession. In single-frame playback, you can move ahead or back one frame at a time using the right and left arrow keys, or skip ahead or back 10 frames using the down and up arrow keys. If you press the two buttons just forward of the LCD panel, the camera resets to the factory defaults—handy if you want to get out of your custom settings quickly. You can also save—and quickly return to—four custom default setups. With a top shutter speed of 1¼4000 and the ability to shoot up to 12 frames at 3 fps, the E-1 is a fine action camera. Photo by John Isaac Flash Like most pro SLRs, film or digital, the E-1 does not have a built-in flash unit. However, it has a TTL hot-shoe for the accessory dedicated Olympus FL-50 flash unit, plus a PC terminal for studio flash systems. With the FL-50, you can apply ±2 stops of flash intensity compensation to adjust the flash effect relative to the ambient lighting, and you can use FP flash, which permits shooting at shutter speeds faster than the camera’s normal maximum flash-sync speed of 1¼180. To set the flash mode, press the flash button and rotate the main or sub dial until the desired flash mode is indicated on the LCD panel: auto-flash (fires when needed, no panel icon), red-eye reduction flash, slow-sync with red-eye reduction, slow-sync, slow 2nd-curtain sync, or fill-in flash (fires for every shot). User Impressions This is a magnificent camera body. The design, the solid feel, the quality...just marvelous. Every well-heeled camera collector should have one just because it’s a terrific example of the camera-maker’s art and craft. When we picked it up, we just didn’t want to put it down. But the E-1 is also a first-rate shooting machine. Autofocusing performance is quick and accurate, metering is excellent, and image quality is outstanding. The ultimate test of an AF system is to try tracking birds in flight with a supertele lens. We didn’t have a supertele, just the 14–54mm (equivalent to a 28–108mm on a 35mm SLR), but it tracked birds at our local wildlife lake very well. And it handled aerial photography from a light airplane very well, too, both shooting through an open window and shooting through the plexiglass—a challenge that that gives some AF systems problems. The E-1 is easy to use and, for a full-featured digital SLR, easy to learn. We like the dial and button-and-dial approach to the regularly used camera settings. It’s a pleasure to be able to switch quality settings quickly., without having to scroll through menus on the LCD monitor. And it’s great to be able to make most adjustments using either control dial, instead of having to remember which is used for what. Downloading images to our Macs was a snap. We usually did it by simply removing the CompactFlash card from the camera and inserting it into our card reader, but it was also very easy to connect the camera to the computer’s USB or FireWire (IEEE 1394) port via the supplied cable, and drag-and-drop the images into a folder on the desktop (Windows 98 requires installation of a driver, but with our Macs it was simply plug-and-play). Users of consumer digicams will be amazed by the battery capacity of the E-1. We shot 467 SHQ images during a 7-hour hike (filling a 1GB CompactFlash card and a 512MB card and getting well into a backup 160MB card) and the battery still had juice left—the low-battery warning had not yet come on, and the battery recharged in 1.5 hours. The E-1 is compatible with Lexar’s Write Acceleration (WA) technology for very quick image recording. One especially nice touch for the working photographer is the protective plastic cover over the LCD monitor. It protects the monitor screen (as evidenced by the scratches it acquired as we shot some 1400 images with the camera, most in harsh field conditions), yet lets you view the monitor images and data extremely well, even outdoors. The one thing we found strange about the E-1 is that the factory (and reset) default record mode is HQ (lowest quality). One would expect that the E-1’s target market—pro and serious amateur photographers—would have little occasion to use HQ, and SHQ would be a better default. But it’s certainly simple enough to change to the desired quality mode. The E-1 offers a good range of record (image-quality) modes, chosen by pressing the record-mode button and rotating the main or sub dial until the desired quality is displayed on the LCD panel atop the camera: RAW (2560x1920 pixels, uncompressed and unprocessed), TIFF (2560x1920 pixels uncompressed), SHQ (2560x1920 pixels with 1/2.7 JPEG compression), HQ (2560x1920 pixels with 1/8 JPEG compression), and SQ (which allows setting several lower-resolution compressed JPEG modes if you’re pressed for memory-card space: 1600x1200, 1280x960, 1024x768 or 640x480 pixels, with 1/2.7 or 1/8 JPEG compression). RAW images take up about 10.2MB each, TIFFs about 14.4MB each, SHQ images about 3.8MB, and HQ 2560x1920 images about 1.2MB. You can also set the camera to record RAW and JPEG images simultaneously. Because the Olympus Viewer software wasn’t ready at the time of our test, we lacked the means to download and process RAW images. So we did all our shooting in TIFF and SHQ mode. And those images looked very good—so good that we’d probably do most of our shooting in SHQ as a good blend between image quality and memory-card capacity (you get almost 4X as many images per card in SHQ mode, and for most purposes won’t see a difference in image quality—SHQ uses just 1/2.7 compression). For pro work for publication, TIFF and RAW modes are available at a twist of a wrist. We should add that our test camera was a late pre-production version, so its performance wasn’t necessarily representative of final production models. Yet even this version performed up to high pro standards in operation and image quality. That, combined with its incredible build quality, makes the new E-1 well worth a look for anyone considering acquiring a digital SLR.