Big Little Camera: The Olympus E-3

Olympus was unique among the big camera makers in that they had not pursued autofocus technology in their interchangeable lens single lens reflex cameras, and therefore when they designed their first digital SLR they were essentially starting from a clean sheet of paper.

Since they didn't have to accommodate an existing lens mount and its associated library of glass, they were free to use a physically smaller sensor, working with Eastman Kodak to create the Four Thirds System.

This allowed for small cameras and small lenses and this was hyped for their early consumer and enthusiast DSLRs, but which probably came back to bite them in the butt when the E-3 was launched in late 2007 because the E-3 is not a small camera.

The thing is, the E-3 wasn't intended to be small and light. It was intended to be a professional camera and the cues are everywhere, in features that you'd normally only find on its Nikon D3 or Canon EOS-1D Mark III contemporaries.

The body was magnesium alloy, rugged and weather sealed. Rather than a mode dial, you cycle through your PASM by holding a button and spinning a control wheel. The battery and memory card doors are secured by positive latches. There's a built-in mechanical shutter to cut off light from the eyepiece for long exposure low-light photography. About the only distinctively "pro" feature it lacked was the built-in vertical grip. Also, thanks to the smaller 10MP Live MOS Four Thirds sensor, it lacked the $4-5,000 price tag of its APS-H and Full Frame competitors, boasting an MSRP of only $1,699 at launch.

It had an articulated 2.5" LCD screen, unlike the competition because, also unlike the competition it could shoot in live view. It sported Olympus's IS in-body image stabilization, a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000th, and could shoot in burst mode at 5 frames per second.

Alas, despite the fact that equivalent lenses were much smaller than its larger-sensored competition, the idea of a pro Four Thirds DSLR just never really caught on.

A shame, because Zuiko glass is great and this thing takes nice pictures...

DSLR Pics: Puppers with the Olympus E-3

The Zuiko Digital ED 12–60mm 1:2.8–4 SWD was the kit lens originally packaged with the Olympus E-3 when it was new. With its 24-120mm equivalent focal length range and fast aperture, it's a good piece of glass and compact compared to equivalent APS-C and full-frame lenses.

Singin' in the Rain

After the LCD display on the top panel, the next two pro camera features I mentioned in my list were a rugged, usually metal body, and weather sealing.

When normal folks would buy that boxed Nikon D3000 or Canon Rebel kit from Walmart or Best Buy, it represented a chunk of change. Especially back in the late '00s, when their only other experience with digital cameras had been a $150-$250 point-'n'-shoot, that $500 to $1000 DSLR kit that they purchased to document their big trip to Europe or their kid's first season of Little League was a luxury item and tended to be treated as such.

On the other hand, working photogs... especially photojournalists, wildlife and sports photographers, et cetera ...treated their cameras like the working tools they were. The body needed to be rugged enough to take a beating, and the weather sealing had to be up to shrugging off the elements.

I stumbled on a leaf-covered sidewalk and faceplanted right on top of this Canon EOS-1D Mark IV

If a camera will stand up to the sidelines of an NFL game or deal with a NatGeo expedition into the Amazon, I figure it's more than up to wandering around my Broad Ripple neighborhood.

I'll note that this is all for naught if not paired with a comparable lens. The Olympus E-5 and the Zuiko Digital 14-35mm f/2 Pro lens are both known for being quite weather-resistant.

Dual slot? Maybe not!

The second on my list of "pro features" after dual control wheels was dual card slots, although in the year 2008, that was still generally found only on the top models of most lineups.

The 1D Mark III and 1Ds Mark III each had one Compact Flash and one SD card slot, but the contemporary 5D Mark II only had the CF slot. Similarly, Nikon's pro D3 had a brace of CF slots, but the D700 only had the one.

Stepping down from full frame to crop sensor, the Canon EOS 40D and Nikon D300 only had one CF slot. Likewise, the Pentax K20D, which was the top digital Pentax of the time, had a lone SD card slot for storage.

Only the Sony a700 and Olympus E-3 had a pair of card slots among the cameras in this tier, but that's for a specific reason. See, both Sony and Olympus had their own in-house memory card formats, so their DSLRs had one slot for Compact Flash and one for Sony Memory Stick (on the a700) or xD (on the E-3).

The card slots on an Olympus E-3

Unlike the dual slots on the pro Nikon and Canon cameras, you couldn't record to both of these cards at the same time, it was strictly one or the other.

It wouldn't be until later, in cameras like the Nikon D300S and D7000 that Nikon let dual card slots trickle down, and Canon users had to wait for the 5D Mark III and 7D Mark II.

Mirrorless Pics: Around downtown Indy with the Olympus PEN E-P5

These were all snapped with an Olympus PEN E-P5 wearing Panasonic's little 20mm f/1.7 pancake standard prime lens.

Lenses I Live By: The Short Portrait

Portrait lenses tend to be longer than standard primes, since this allows taking photos without having to be all up in the subject’s grille, as well as exaggerating the effects of focal length compression to not cause the subject’s features to look distorted.

The “short” portrait focal length range, in my own personal lexicon, runs from about 75mm to 105mm, in full-frame terms. (I use “full-frame terms” because the 35mm format spent something like fifty years establishing itself as the lingua franca of normie photography jargon.) 

Most of the camera systems I use have a lens that falls into this category. For instance, the Nikon 1 system, with its little 1" CX-format sensor, has the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2, which has the equivalent focal length of 87mm.

Nikon 1 V2 & 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2

Moving up to Micro Four Thirds, there are some pretty slick choices. Panasonic goes with 42.5mm focal lengths, which is an 85mm equivalent, in an inexpensive f/1.7 version and a bucks-up Leica Nocticron-branded f/1.2. Olympus, on the other hand, favors the 90mm equivalent 45mm focal length. They, too, offer a spendy f/1.2 PRO lens, but the M. Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1.8 is so compact, light, and inexpensive that it's the one I choose.

Things are similar with the Fujifilm X-mount ecosystem. There's a honking big 56mm f/1.2 portrait lens, but again, the bargain is the XF 50mm R WR "Fujicron", for its compact size and value pricing.

Fujifilm X-T2 & XF 50mm f/2 R WR

For my full-frame Canon DSLRs, I count on the EF 85mm f/1.8 for this task.

Canon EOS 5DS & EF 85mm f/1.8

DSLR Pics: Sports Cars with the Olympus E-510

The 10MP Olympus E-510 was the immediate successor to the E-500 as Olympus's midrange Four Thirds DSLR. It replaced the eight megapixel Kodak CCD sensor of the earlier model with a ten megapixel Panasonic Live MOS sensor, and was the first Oly DSLR to offer Live View as well as in-body image stabilization.

It's a compact little camera, roughly comparable to a Canon Rebel XTi; a little wider, a little shorter, and an ounce lighter. The difference comes in the lenses, since even a high performance zoom like the Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 is about the same size as an 18-135mm EF-S travel zoom for the crop sensor canons.

DSLR Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-5

Sunday was supposed to be good squirrel-spotting weather. Clear and cold, but no wind to speak of (arboreal critters tend to hunker in their drays when the boughs get to whipping around.)

I put the Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm F3.5-5.6 Asph superzoom on the Olympus E-5 for my walk around the neighborhood but mostly came up empty handed.

I'm still looking for a lens hood for this thing, but they're unobtainium.

With an equivalent maximum focal length of 300mm on the Oly's Four Thirds sensor, I had plenty of reach for squirrel snapping, but I lacked for subjects.

At fifteen years old, the E-5 is starting to show its age, but if you keep the ISO at 400 or lower, it still does just fine.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X

It's an example of the weird time dilation of 2020 that I can't believe that the Olympus E-M1X is six years old. It was launched in January of 2019 as a dedicated pro body for the Oly Micro Four Thirds line that was heavily specialized for sports and wildlife, leveraging the greatest strength of the MFT format: Enormous focal length lenses in very small packages.

Mirrorless Pics: Squirrels with the Olympus E-M1X

These were snapped with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X using the M. Zuiko Digital 12-200mm f/3.5-6.3 superzoom. That lens is one of the great things about the Micro Four Thirds format, as it has an equivalent focal length range to a 24-400mm lens on a full frame camera yet is smaller than a soda can.

DSLR Pics: Urban wildlife with the Olympus E-5

Pairing the ultimate Four Thirds DSLR, Olympus's E-5 from 2010, with the only real quality superzoom in the Four Thirds ecosystem, the Panasonic Leica Vario-Elmar 14-150mm f/3.5-5.6, gives a pretty handy package for snapping pics of urban wildlife.

Mourning Dove

Chipmunk

Squirrel!

Moar Squirrel!

Vintage DSLR Pics: Lions with the Olympus E-600

The Olympus Zuiko Digital 150mm f/2.0 is a magnificent lens. For these photos snapped at the Indianapolis Zoo, it was mounted on a 12MP Olympus E-600, one of the last Four Thirds DSLRs from Olympus, released in late 2009.

Vintage DSLR Pics: Flowers in the Rain

It was raining off and on last Sunday, and there's no DSLR that I trust in the wet as much as I do an Olympus Four Thirds pro body. The E-3 and E-5 are absolutely tops in the weather-resistance category.

This photo of a morning glory speckled with raindrops was taken with an Olympus E-3 and the Zuiko Digital 14-35mm f/2 zoom lens.

The next night we got our first real hard freeze of the season and all the morning glories along this neighbor's fence are wilted and gone until next year.

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Olympus E-300 EVOLT review, part 2…

(Continued from Part I...)

The DSLR market… heck, the whole digital camera market …was way different in 2004 than it is now. It’s even different than it was in the mid ‘teens before cheap digicams were crushed by the increasing abilities of camera phones.

Due to the price of sensors, early DSLRs were marketed directly to professional photographers, the sort of people who could write off camera purchases on their taxes as a legitimate business expense. Sure, some well-heeled amateurs bought the early Nikon D1’s and Canon D30’s in 1999-2000, but interchangeable lens digital cameras remained a phenomenon reserved for people who could blow quite a wad on one. 

By early 2004, the first “inexpensive” DSLRs had hit the market from Canon and Nikon. The Digital Rebel from Canon (sold elsewhere as the 300D) stickered for right at a grand with a kit zoom lens, and Nikon’s D70 went for the same sticker price for just the body; adding a lens to the Nikon took the tariff to twelve ninety-nine.

Looking back at the DSLR market from its sunset years, it’s common to refer to the lowest price models in any manufacturer’s catalog as “entry” or “beginner” cameras, but you couldn’t really classify these cameras that way, since they had to serve two market niches. One niche may have been actual beginners, but the other was photography enthusiasts who just hadn’t been convinced to spring for a “serious” digital camera yet.

Bear in mind that the thousand dollar Rebel or D70 in 2004 was selling for the equivalent of sixteen hundred bucks in 2023 dollars.  These days that’s a sum of money that will get you solidly into the ranks of “prosumer” cameras.

When Olympus jumped into this market in 2004 with their second DSLR, the EVOLT E-300, they had to make a camera that wouldn't intimidate novices, but would offer enough control to avoid alienating advanced amateurs.

So the dial on the top offers the usual PASM modes for the latter, as well as the little icons of a face, a mountain, a running dude, and the cryptic hieroglyph that signifies a backlit subject to appease the former. In addition, there's a "SCENE" setting on the dial that drops you into a menu of more than a dozen other presets, to include everything from "fireworks" and "night portrait" to "museum" and "document".

Bobbi's rental Tiguan in the foreground, my '94 GT in the background
Olympus E-300 & Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 

In 2023, the E-300 has several downsides.

While it's capable of taking perfectly adequate photos in capable hands as long as one stays within its limitations, those limitations are pretty severe.

The camera's ISO range is limited to 100, 200, and 400 settings, and the vintage Four Thirds CCD-type sensor is hella noisy by the time you're at 400. Compounding this problem is the fact that, if you pick up a used example and nobody's bothered to update its BIOS, it will only work with the old Four Thirds kit lenses that existed when it was new. I have several good pieces of fast Four Thirds glass, but the first time I tried mounting the 12-60mm f/2.8-4 on the camera, I thought I'd bricked it. It took turning it off and removing the battery for a hard reset to get the thing up and running again.

Further, the Porro finder is a dim and cramped little tunnel that will leave you pining for the subpar pentamirrors found on a D3000 or Rebel XTi.

All in all, unless you are just chasing a retro experience for giggles, collecting old Olympus DSLRs, or trying something a little challenging, I'd probably pass on an E-300 for actual use.

My pal Bug behind the bar at Fat Dan's in SoBro.
Olympus E-300 & Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6

E-300 update...

Just needing to gather up some more photos with the Olympus E-300 EVOLT to illustrate the second half of the review.

Here's a loaded baked potato shot in indirect sunlight at base ISO of 100 and a pistol shot on a heavily overcast morning at the max ISO of 400. (Well, maximum unexpanded ISO. But it's noisy enough without faking ISO 800 or 1600.)

Both were taken using the Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, more about which in the closing part of the review.

Olympus E-300 Review: Part 1

Olympus launched their first DSLR, the E-1, to much fanfare in 2003. Not only was it the first DSLR from Olympus, it was the first interchangeable lens system camera designed from the ground up for a digital sensor, rather than being adapted from a film camera.

Unlike Canon and Nikon, Olympus didn’t have a huge installed user base of autofocus lens owners they had to lure to digital, so they started with a clean sheet of paper for their sensor and lens mount.

As part of the Four Thirds consortium, along with Kodak, Panasonic, and Fuji, they used a smaller sensor, which would be less expensive, an important factor in those days when image sensors were still phenomenally spendy. The E-1 had a ruggedized, weather-sealed magnesium alloy body, an innovative ultrasonic vibrating sensor cleaning mechanism, and resolution equivalent to or better than the contemporary Canon EOS-1D and Nikon D1X despite only costing $1699 (about 2800 bucks in 2023 dollars).

Almost simultaneous with the launch of the Olympus E-1 came the next shot fired in the DSLR wars, from Canon, who announced a stripped down consumer DSLR with a plastic body shell for under a grand. The 6.3MP EOS 300D, sold in the US as the Digital Rebel, hit shelves for $999 with a bundled 18-55mm kit lens. Olympus returned fire in 2004 with their second DSLR, a consumer-grade 8MP camera named the E-300, which sold for $999 with a Zuiko 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens included in the box.

The E-300 had three selectable autofocus points, had an ISO range of 100-400 (expandable to 800 or 1600, but don't bother), shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, and could shoot 2.5 frames/sec...at least for four frames, at which point the buffer was filled.

Despite the lack of a viewfinder hump (due to its odd Porro finder system) and small Four Thirds sensor, the E-300 wasn't meaningfully smaller than its competition from Canon, although it offered more megapixels for less money.

Part two of this review will have some photo results and conclusions!

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Portrait Photos With the Olympus E-510

Olympus's DSLR cameras have been discontinued for more than a decade now, but that doesn't mean they can't still snap a decent picture.

The E-510 was their midrange offering from 2007 that introduced the Panasonic-designed MOS sensor to the Oly DSLR lineup, replacing the Kodak-manufactured CCD sensor used by the earlier cameras. 

Its predecessors had already introduced dust reduction and live view to the DSLR market, and to those features the 10-megapixel E-510 added in-body image stabilization, previously a Pentax exclusive.

I've been out shooting with my E-510 lately, using the excellent Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4.0 zoom lens, which has a field of view equivalent to the classic 24-120mm focal length zoom lens on a full-frame sensor.

Here are a couple of casual portraits snapped with this setup at my neighborhood hangout, Fat Dan's Chicago Style Deli...

Grumble...

Here's a gripe...

Olympus's E-3 DSLR came out in late '07 and was roughly comparable to the Nikon D300 and Canon 40D. It had two card slots: A CF card slot like a normal camera and a slot for Olympus's almost-proprietary xD card. It couldn't record to both simultaneously, and you couldn't even set it to switch over automatically when whichever one you were using filled up. Oly was just clinging to xD like grim death and wanted to sell cards, I guess.

Anyway, a couple years later the E-5 came out. An updated E-3 with HD video, 2MP more resolution, and some other tweaks, it was the last gasp of Olympus's Four Thirds DSLR system, and the closest to a true pro body they'd yet made. They even bowed to the inevitable and replaced the xD slot with an SD slot like a normal camera.

Guess what? You still can't write to both slots simultaneously.

WTF, Olympus?

Practical Pixels

In 2004, digital cameras had become mainstream, but sensors were still expensive. Digital SLRs with 35mm-sized "full-frame" sensors were exotically expensive, being limited to the Canon EOS 1Ds and some Kodak hybrids.

Point 'n' Shoot compacts, now commonplace and offered by every manufacturer, were still generally a couple hundred bucks. Most were in the 5-6 megapixel range and had built in zoom lenses, video recording ability, and other gimmicks to offset their physically tiny sensors.

The interchangeable-lens DSLR had just dropped below the thousand-dollar mark with Canon's 6.3MP Digital Rebel (aka the 300D) and there was something of a format war in the category.

Canon and Nikon were constrained by the need to woo customers who already had substantial investments in their 35mm film camera systems. In order to allow the film camera lenses to be usefully ported over, the sensors couldn't be too small, or else they'd not work well. This also allowed the two makers to essentially convert existing film camera technology to digital; indeed, their early DSLRs were based on 35mm film camera bodies.

The solution was a sensor size that became known as APS-C. Canon & Nikon used slightly different sensor sizes, with Canon's offering an effective 1.6X focal length multiplier to existing lenses, and Nikon's multiplying by 1.5X.

Olympus and Panasonic, on the other hand, went with a clean sheet of paper: an all-new sensor format called Four Thirds. About the same size as an old 110 Instamatic film negative, these small sensors were cheaper than APS-C to make, and had a 2X crop factor relative to a "full frame" camera. In other words, a 50mm lens, which is a standard mid-focal length on traditional film cameras, would act like a 100mm lens on a Four Thirds camera.

In 2004, the super coolest most ultra APS-C camera was probably Nikon's D2X pro camera. Boasting a 12MP sensor and a $5,000 price tag, this would be the camera used by photojournalists everywhere from NFL sidelines to the war zones of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Olympus had just launched their second Four Thirds camera, and their first one targeted at consumers rather than pros and enthusiasts. The E-300 used a Kodak-manufactured CCD sensor, and it had two-thirds the megapixels of the top-of-the-line Nikon, and could be had for a fifth of the money; while five grand got you a Nikon D2X with no lens, just a box and a battery charger, the Olympus EVOLT E-300 could be had for $999 with a 14-45mm zoom lens included in the kit.

With more and more people viewing pictures on screens, what was the practical difference? Here are some pics shot with an E-300 and the 14-45mm kit zoom, compared to ones shot with a D2X and the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II.

E-300

D2X

E-300

D2X

E-300

D2X

Truthfully the biggest visual difference to me, after accounting for the mangling effects of compression, is actually one of sensor technology, more than size or megapixel count.

The Nikon D2X uses a Sony-sourced CMOS sensor, while the Olympus E-300 uses a Kodak-made CCD sensor. While CCD sensors have been more or less completely replaced by CMOS ones, there are holdouts who insist that the CCD had "more pleasing" images, sometimes providing facts, but often with a level of hand-waving woo reminiscent of vinyl discs and vacuum tube amps.

You can embigennate the pics and judge for yourselves.

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