Olympus E-3

I'm an Oly fan, have been since the E-1 but nothing has come close to the E-1 IMO.

So are any of the OLY shooters, impressed?

Specs:
11-point AF system
5fps sequential shooting with 19 image RAWs
High-performance built-in image stabiliser to stabilise all lenses
(up to 5 EV steps)
10 Megapixel Live MOS sensor
viewfinder with 100% coverage and 1.15x magnification.


I'm worried that the IQ will be the same as the other Livemos 4/3 cameras, which i'm not too impressed with.

The IS sounds nice but its not enough to make me shift from Nikon.

Those who tried it at the New York launch were certainly impressed. The specs basically confirm what has been known for a few months now. The built-in remote flash control looks interesting (up to 12 flashes in 3 groups of 4). I bet that would be great for Badger photography as would that nice quiet shutter.



Paul

The sensor in the E-3 appears to be the same as the recently announced Panasonic camera, it is not out of the 410/510 as widely banded about on some forums - it is 11.8Mp of which 10Mp is used. The blurb promises greater dynamic range - which will be welcomed if true

Still cannot get my head round the weather proofing for the pop up flash, seems difficult to achieve, but hey ho wait for the reviews in a couple of months time. - Phil Askey and DPreview seem to have settled the earlier spat with Oly now

Your list was pretty well predicted from the leaked pdf a few months ago - as with Paul T what caught my eye was the new range of wireless flashes with a purported operating range of 200 mtrs. - plus the new battery grip has an AA tray option and it uses 2 standard BLM1 batteries - no rip off battery upgrades as with the original handgrip and other manufacturers

If it handles anywhere near as well as the E-1 it will be a very nice camera to use, I just also hope the 2x teleconverter being launched next month gives equal quality to the current 1.4 tc which is a little cracker (and also a shame Oly have disabled stacking thro' chipping the tcs).........

Oly also seem to have tweaked the AF sensor sensitivity allowing them to work to -2ev and hence low light shooting with minimal hunting - just hope the marketing hype works in practice

and SWD to look forward to as well, slowly but surely the Oly E system is growing in credibility

Olympus Korea have some sample images at:

http://www.olympus-esystem.co.kr/products/e3/e3_sample.jsp

Some of the thumbnail to image links seem to be broken though.



Paul

Yawn....... what a horrible delay in loading the images

Particularly impressed by the water skier shot, no purple fringing on the water shimmer and the depth and detail in the black wetsuit is impressive - sensor seems to have handled the high contrast scene very well.

It's not the fastest site around

Yes DR looks good. It looks that shot was taken with the 150/f2 from the exif so I wouldn't expect to see any CA. I think these must be samples provided by the Olympus Visionaries. Thery're obviously taken by people who know what they're doing and cover the main photographic genre. My favourite is the elephants at sunrise/set



Paul

It may turn out to be a very good camera... but my god (or gods) they have managed to make the ugliest camera ever... I mean the E-1 was a work of art, and probably the most ergonomic camera ever. Why did they have to break it?

I was thinking more of the high contrast fringing you get when sensors cannot cope with burnt out whites - frequently seen on water shimmer (also sometimes manifests itself as green fringing) and dark twigs against a blown out sky, not CA as such, but a severe test of the sensor.


Now found a smug mug site here hich loads much faster and gives the EXIF info - note the blue racing touring car is taken with the 300mm and the new 2x converter ie 1200mm FOV shot at 1/60 second - impressive stuff!

Not sure about the mega sharp sunflower shot, is that an example of a flash and studio set up? there seems to be shadowing of the petals against the blue sky......

Paul G - possibly as a result of squeezing in the larger pentaprism needed to give the 1.2x mag for larger viewfinder display? but I agree the battery grip looks very much like an after-thought lashup!

The flower looks like it it's laid on top of a background. I suppose it's something them arty types like doing The 12-60 looks like a very sharp lens though. The car isn't the best sort image to judge the effectiveness of the 2x on the 300 though. Something furry or feathery would have been much better. Marco, who's put the images on smugmugs, is a regular on fourththirdsphoto. Ian from DPNow has also been on fourthirdsphoto today. He's got a pre-production E-3 (but no SWD lenses yet). He's not allowed to post any images but has said that it's _very_ nice. Build quality is superb as you'd expect. Shutter quiet like the E-1. And viewfinder really big and bright. Agreed it's not the prettiest camera about. Obviously Olympus's engineeers have more say in these things that their marketing people



Paul

HI I have no idea what the technical stuff you guys are discussing but I have an Olympus E500 digital camera with interchangeble lens. I love it because if you know all about cameras you can use the manual setting and if you aren't so knowledgable you can use the pre sets. If I could ever figure out how to get a picture on this site I would show you some really nice pictures that I got with this camera. I mainly liked this camera because it feels like a real 35 mm camera and didn't cost $10,000.
My favorite photographer is Mark Adamus his stuff is just so beautilful!! Just love him!