Olympus E-300
Olympus have announced a new consumer DSLR, the E-300. It uses their 4/3-system sensor and a mirror viewfinder, so is remarkably compact for a camera at this level. I've wanted to switch to a DSLR for a while, and maybe this would be it. I have looked at the E-1, but it's just a bit too expensive for the amount I'd use it.
This seems to be the E-1 scaled down and with some more amateur features added, such as scene modes. (I'd personally be happy with just PASM, but I guess it's necessary for this market.) It does have a built-in pop-up flash, which plays well with the compact size. The RAM buffer might be smaller than that of the E-1 and it's missing the splash-proof triple seals.
The sensor is a bit smaller than on the competing Canon 300D and the Nikon D70, as a tradeoff for having a substantially smaller body and lenses. I wonder if the smaller sensor is going to cause substantially more noise at any given ISO. On my current Minolta 7i there is noticeable noise at ISO 400 and 800 is often barely usable.
So far (29 Sep) a few people have seen it at the Photokina expo, but there's not much on the net aside from the Olympus press release and spec sheet.
The physical design of the camera looks intriguing, and it looks like it will fix a few annoyances in digital cameras to date.
There's no top LCD, as there is on the E-1 and many other digital cameras today. All the information is available on the review TFT or through the viewfinder. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff: there's already a large display on the back, and information in the viewfinder, so I'm not sure a top display is really needed. If it keeps the price and size down, by all means pull it out; the only downside is probably higher current drain when the TFT is on.
Playback is just through a single button, so presumably you can pop back into shooting mode just by half-pressing the shutter. Putting playback on a mode dial always seemed pretty pointless to me.
There are hard buttons for all the common functions, plus a single rotating control: exposure, WB, resolution, ISO, autofocus mode and point, flash mode, meter mode, (maybe more). It's probably a good tradeoff between interface simplicity and quick access; I hope it will let the user keep out of the time-consuming menus. So all in all it looks like quite a step forward in interface design; let's hope the photo quality is as good.
Olympus have some opinions of Japanese pros on the E-1 — the automatic sensor cleaning and compact lenses seem like the strong points. It looks like the lens system and sensor have carried over from the E-1 to the E-300, so hopefully it will do just as well.
Ted's Cameras are now advertising it at a price of AUD 2000 (approx USD 1400) (to be confirmed), available in November. That would puts makes it a little more than the EOS 300D, and below the Nikon D70 and EOS 20D.
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posted Sat 2 Oct 2004 in /photo/tech | link
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