2023 Weekly Challenge Week 30: Olympus PEN EPL-1

Much like the Canon Rebel XTi the Olympus PEN EPL-1 brings me back to the roots of another personal first in my evolution in digital photography and that was my first Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera. 

Technically my first MILC was an Olympus PEN EPL-2; but try as I might I was not able to re-purchase that camera for a reasonable price. The PEN EPL-1 is far more common and is similar enough to my first MILC that shooting this camera defiantly takes me back.

When I first got the EPL-2 I was amazed at how small the lenses were. True, the Canon Rebel and XXD cameras I was used to using the lenses were not huge (as I only owned entry level glass at the time) but the fact that I could almost fit the PEN EPL-2 in my jacket pocket with a lens attached was mindblowing for me in 2012.

Micro 43rds is a compact and great system for travel while still providing excellent image quality that trounced my pocket camera and phone.

This started me down the road of buying into Micro 43rds as a secondary or backup system, a camera that would see me upgrade to a Olympus PEN EPM-2, Olympus PEN EM5, Panasonic GX8 and eventually to the Panasonic G9 which is my current Micro 43rds workhorse (as it is a recent purchase this year made after this was first posted I will be reviewing the G9 later this year.). 

Released in 2010 the Olympus EPL-1 was the first true "Entry Level" Micro 43rds camera that Olympus made. Prior to this Olympus released the PEN EP1 and EP2 but these were more mid-range models. The higher end "Professional" line the OMD EM series would come two years later with the third Micro 43rds camera I owned, the Olympus OMD EM5 in 2012 (though I didn't buy my EM5 till 2015).

The EPL-2 added a control dial around the 4 way pad to quickly and smoothly change settings such as aperture, shutter and exposure compensation.  That said the controls of the EPL-1 were still quite decent and useable to change what I needed to change without having to dig through a lot of menus.

Both cameras featured the same 12mp CMOS Micro 43rds format sensor and shutter mechanism which is an even 2x crop from a Full Frame sensor.  

This made the Micro 43rds system very powerful for Nature and Sports photography even if they would remain a niche underdog system to this day within the shadow of Full Frame and even Pro APS-C bodies.

The biggest draw to the Olympus PEN series was the size.  When paired with smaller lenses (such as the 25mm f1.8 seen in my example) they made for nearly pocketable interchangeable lens kits.  And this is what drew me into buying the EPL-2 (Though the GX8 and G9 I would buy into later would be significantly larger).

Another key feature was that the EPL-1 had In Body Stabilization, a feature which only Sony offered in their "Mirrorless Hybrid" SLT cameras at the time.  This made Olympus PEN and other Olympus Micro 43rds bodies extremely popular for adapting old vintage lenses since you could get IS without having to have it in the glass.  

It would take Panasonic a few generations until the Panasonic GX7 (the predecessor to mine) to add in IBIS, whereas Olympus had this feature since their very first Micro 43rds camera the EP1.

The PEN EPL-1 had some downsides even compared to the DSLRs of the time.  For one if you wanted an EVF you needed to purchase it separately and it took up the Hotshoe mount to do so, albeit this also made the camera somewhat modular.  

Additionally the camera would have a "black out" period after taking a photo when the shutter reset; so liveview would be unavailable for a moment which made the EPL-1 a very poor choice for any kind of action or sports shooting (and its slow burst rate didn't aid to this either).

The lack of control wheels was another thing that would be improved upon on later PEN models but wouldn't really be perfected until the OMD EM series.  

A lot of people complain about the early Olympus PENs having slow Autofocus and I really don't see that. I think this stems from people comparing them to something like an OM-1 or Panasonic G9 and that is like comparing apples to oranges.  For its time the Olympus PEN series had perfectly decent autofocus systems and often times the CDAF of the EPL-2 out performed my Canon Rebels Phase Detect Auto Focus due to a drawback known as "Focus Hunting" that was common in early Canon Rebel cameras up until the Canon T2i.

For Street Photography I found the Olympus EPL-1 more then adequate as a solid performer even 13 years later.  Its startup and shutdown times weren't instantaneous like most DSLRs but it was still fast enough that I really didn't notice it and it didn't cause me to miss many shots.  The rear LCD is bright enough that it's more then capable of a viewfinder even under fairly harsh lighting (I had a clip on shade for my EPL-2 when I owned it as I didn't own the EVF for it).  That said yeah there were a few times I missed not having a built in EVF which became a similar issue for my Canon M3 that I no longer own.

The EPL-1 and EPL-2 have a max ISO of 1600 which was pretty low even compared to pocket cameras of the time.  However this is a Hardware ISO and photos taken at 1600 are actually quite useable; so Olympus cut the ISO off instead of extending it like pocket cameras would to give you crisp low noise photos no matter what ISO the camera was set at.  

Shooting the EPL-1 eleven years later from when I owned a very similar camera was still a very enjoyable experience overall. The images were very clean and sharp.  It has a lot of limitations that my newer M43 bodies overcame (like ISO 1600 limit and a very slow burst rate) but shooting it as a casual camera is still very doable even today.  

Even if the EPL-1 was a lot slower and took some patience to use, it certainly was not the most challenging in that respect from other cameras in my collection and it never reached the level of frustration that I had reached with some of the other cameras in my collection; including some of the older bridge cameras like the Minolta DiMage A2 and Canon Powershot Pro1.

Along with some street photography I managed to get some Nature photos using this camera that turned out quite well; one shot in particular really stood out which is posted in my example photos below.