OK followers of my Olympus 4/3rds experiments pin back your lug'oles....
I have now acquired a s/h E-1 body, much much better than the E-500, think in terms of the original Canon 1D but with 3AF points,- fully weather proofed mag alloy body, good buffer and frame rate, nice controls but in a smaller more compact body. Same 5MP sensor size but with 2x crop. At £300 the currant s/h value a bargain.
I have also now acquired a s/h 50-200ED F2/3.5 zoom, think Canon EF 100-400L IS zoom but lighter, faster aperture but without IS, 400mm at F3.5 instead of F5.6, it has a twist zoom operation rather than push/pull but still extends when zooming.
So armed with both on a light monopod I had a wander round Regents Park last Thursday lunchtime to give the combination a work out.... and I am impressed especially with the Olympus metering system.
So here is the first of a series over this week, all shots are full frame, camera set to RAW, Av, ESP (Oly speak for full segment metering), CAF, ISO200 and pretty well left to manage itself, no metering adjustments at all.
RAW File processed as follows, no adjustment other than sharpening - so this is the RAW file output, input sharpening 300, 0.3,0, image resize, further USM of 100,0.5,2, change to sRGB and save as jpeg, and that's it.
Oly E-1, 50-200ED at 147mm (=294mm), ISO 200, F3.2 (ie wide open)1/500s
Looks like the greater DOF means it's harder to get clean backgrounds.
I like the idea of the 4/3rds system, and hope more manufacturers that have signed up actually make bodies (e.g. Fujifilm). Panasonic/Leica have announced (but not yet delivered) some interesting things the system.
Love my Canon gear - but I'm always interested in new ideas Mike, so I look forward to seeing how your experiments progress. Might be an idea to insert a 100% crop fragment into a full frame image to give an impression of the noise/detail in the image.
The magpie looks pretty good for an unadjusted image.
100% crops from the image, compared to a similar 100% crop (barn owl head) from a 1D file using the EF 500F4.5L lens at F4.5 taken last year - backgound OOF noise level is about the same, the Oly E-1 file is 200 ISO, the 1D file is 400ISO
but also look at my posting today (G H a2m) for how well the 100% crop images clean up with Noise Ninja.
Looks like it will be an interesting lightweight kit..... will be staying with my Canon gear but it is always interesting to be able to compare relative performance of the different systems and this Olympus is looking fine...
Discussion
4 repliesI have now acquired a s/h E-1 body, much much better than the E-500, think in terms of the original Canon 1D but with 3AF points,- fully weather proofed mag alloy body, good buffer and frame rate, nice controls but in a smaller more compact body. Same 5MP sensor size but with 2x crop. At £300 the currant s/h value a bargain.
I have also now acquired a s/h 50-200ED F2/3.5 zoom, think Canon EF 100-400L IS zoom but lighter, faster aperture but without IS, 400mm at F3.5 instead of F5.6, it has a twist zoom operation rather than push/pull but still extends when zooming.
So armed with both on a light monopod I had a wander round Regents Park last Thursday lunchtime to give the combination a work out.... and I am impressed especially with the Olympus metering system.
So here is the first of a series over this week, all shots are full frame, camera set to RAW, Av, ESP (Oly speak for full segment metering), CAF, ISO200 and pretty well left to manage itself, no metering adjustments at all.
RAW File processed as follows, no adjustment other than sharpening - so this is the RAW file output, input sharpening 300, 0.3,0, image resize, further USM of 100,0.5,2, change to sRGB and save as jpeg, and that's it.
Oly E-1, 50-200ED at 147mm (=294mm), ISO 200, F3.2 (ie wide open)1/500s
Looks like the greater DOF means it's harder to get clean backgrounds.
I like the idea of the 4/3rds system, and hope more manufacturers that have signed up actually make bodies (e.g. Fujifilm). Panasonic/Leica have announced (but not yet delivered) some interesting things the system.
The magpie looks pretty good for an unadjusted image.
John
100% crops from the image, compared to a similar 100% crop (barn owl head) from a 1D file using the EF 500F4.5L lens at F4.5 taken last year - backgound OOF noise level is about the same, the Oly E-1 file is 200 ISO, the 1D file is 400ISO
but also look at my posting today (G H a2m) for how well the 100% crop images clean up with Noise Ninja.
All the best