Olympus PEN E-PL1 Image Samples

The image on this page were all taken with the Olympus Pen E-PL1 using the Olympus micro 4/3 mount 14-42/3.5-5.6 lens supplied with the camera.

Pretty much any camera gives good image quality at low ISO settings and the Olympus Pen E-PL1 is no exception. Where many cameras (especially small cameras) show weakness is at higher ISO settings, so that's where I'm going to concentrate here. All the images on this page were shot close to or just after sunset.

First is an image shot at ISO 3200. Exposure was 1/200s at f8 and the lens was zoomed to 25mm.

And here is a 100% crop from that image:

I think that's still very good image quality. Noise is well controlled (this is a JPEG straight out of the camera) and yet fine detail isn't smeared to much by the noise reduction. Overall, pretty good.

The next image was shot at ISO 1600, 1/30s at f4 with the lens set to 19mm.

And here is a 100% crop from that image. Again noise is well controlled and the image sharpness holds up well.

Again, creditable performance I think.

Finally a shot taken at ISO 640, 1/80s @ f5.6 with the lens zoomed to 40mm

And again a 100% crop from the above image

Again low noise and good sharpness. The colors look muted, but they are accurate and appear that way on the original poster.

Just to show the lens at 14mm, here's a shot taken at ISO 800, 1/60s at f3.5 with the lens zoomed all the way out to 14mm.

Overall, after looking at dozens of images shot with the Olympus PEN E-PL1 I can say I was quite pleased with the noise performance. Exposure was accurate and auto white balance was pretty close most of the time. Focus with the 14-42/3.5-5.6 was accurate and even under the fairly dark conditions under which the images shown above were taken AF was positive (no hunting).

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