update: added link to wired’s hands-on review 06/20, 6.27am
update: added new clos­ing para­graph, link to photo.net’s hands-on pre­view 06/19, 8.12am

Olympus, the lesser known giant of the cam­era indus­try has once again strike a stir with the intro­duc­tion of their new retro-vintage style cam­era the E-P1. Dubbed as the new PEN, the launch also marks their 50^th anniver­sary of the orig­i­nal PEN series, which has seen its golden days on the 60-70s.

Now at its 3^rd model, the E-PL1 might come just in time for the sea­son, whether you’re tak­ing pho­tographs for the o2 mobile phone deals reviews or you want some­thing styl­ish and retro to cart around while you’re on hol­i­day, this might be the answer to your joy­ous wishes.

Beneath the hood lies the industry’s worst kept secret, the Micro Four Thirds¹ for­mat, an even smaller sen­sor of the Four Thirds sys­tem Olympus has been mar­ket­ing for the DSLR mar­ket for a cou­ple of years now.

Personally, I like how the cam­era main­tains its retro design with­out com­pro­mis­ing fea­tures. This lit­tle beast cap­tures HD qual­ity video with its image sta­bi­lized 12.3 megapixel (Live MOS) sen­sor capa­ble of shoot­ing up to ISO 6400, which jus­ti­fies the absent of an inter­nal flash.

There is one fun­da­men­tal flaw with this new (even smaller) format.

Serious pho­tog­ra­phers, or those who opt for a big­ger for­mat will surely under­stand the impor­tance of image qual­ity but that’s not the real rea­son, even smaller sen­sors are more capa­ble in pro­duc­ing higher qual­ity images nowa­days, what I’m refer­ring to here is the actual opti­cal image recorded by the sen­sor, and there are para­me­ters that define the qual­ity of such, e.g. sharp­ness, color, con­trast, or dis­tor­tion, etc., and there’s one thing that can­not be achieved with smaller size sen­sor: Maximum Depth of Field.

Now, would a smaller, lighter, a more com­pact cam­era jus­ti­fies that for you? Or do you pre­fer the bulkier, not-so-easy-to-carry-around all day cam­era by your side, all the time? Believe me, the answer is not as easy as it seems while its eas­ier for some who has dif­fer­ent priorities.

And that’s the key­word: Priority.

Priority means know­ing what you are look­ing for and choos­ing your gear based on the sub­ject. Priority means know­ing your lim­its and bend­ing towards it, not against it. Priority ulti­mately means know­ing what you want and when to go for it, or not to begin.

Photography is an addic­tive hobby, not to men­tion its pricey nature. There will be no end once you begin, and only sky is the limit once you begin that journey.

We are now in the phase where every­thing begins with a new end­ing, what was once con­sid­ered a dying style is now back in fash­ion, retro is that new fash­ion, and old is becom­ing new, again. Style may fade but wis­dom stays.

The leg­endary Leica M Series never changed its basic style for more than 50 years and their prod­ucts con­tin­ues to sell strong (left), regard­less of their age. The newer Leica Digilux System (right) shares the same design phi­los­o­phy while adopt­ing tech­no­log­i­cal edge beyond its look–Leica works together with Panasonic for the dig­i­tal elec­tron­ics part.

A finer exam­ple may be found with Olympus’ own PEN mod­els, among the two which one of them is new, or old?

Another layer of inno­va­tion involves rein­vent­ing the old wis­dom with a newer tech­nol­ogy, which Hasselblad has demon­strated per­fectly with its inno­v­a­tive HTS 1.5 lens mount sys­tem (below left) that rein­vents how lenses can be adjusted inde­pen­dently pro­vid­ing per­spec­tive, tilf/shift con­trol against the film plane.

The same phe­nom­e­non also hap­pens on how we per­ceive looks in gen­eral, in par­tic­u­lar how retro look­ing pho­tographs are back in fashion!

…and the never-dying Black & White.

Back to the E-P1, the real head­line is not the retro look­ing design, nor the new Micro Four Thirds sen­sor, rather than what the future might unfold based on this new prod­uct. As touted by Akira Watanabe, prod­uct plan­ning man­ager of Olympus’s SLR divi­sion, The E-P1 will be the first of a range of Micro Four Thirds cam­eras from Olympus. Also planned in the pipeline are lens adapters that allow older man­ual focus Zuiko (SLR, OM System) or the newer auto-focus Zuiko optics (dSLR, E-System) lenses to be mounted on this new cam­era, as well as open­ing up to other 3-rd party man­u­fac­tur­ers so other lenses can be fit­ted too (with sen­sor this small, basi­cally all lenses can be fit­ted to this camera).

On the final note, just as the wheel turns, what was old, become new again, and there may be days where Big is the new Small, and/or vice versa. I’d always think of pho­tog­ra­phy as some­thing that is not bet­ter when it’s smaller, it’s much more than being small but being use­ful to its owner. While many will find this new offer­ing from Olympus as sexy, there will always be a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive for oth­ers that will find big­ger sys­tems more lucra­tive to their needs. But the good news is, such com­pe­ti­tion will always ben­e­fit us as cus­tomers, more tech­nol­ogy on less money to spend.

(If you are curi­ous, the anniver­sary model of PEN, on the right is a real vin­tage model)

Further read­ing:

If you are inter­ested in buy­ing this cam­era, you might also want to check out: