The Olympus EP-1 Pen ($800 with a 3X zoom lens), which will be available next month, is supposed to be the hybrid the world has been waiting for: the guts of a single-lens reflex camera in the body of a pocket cam.
Take a few pictures, and you're certifiably in love: They are spectacular. There's a clarity of light, an almost molecular level of detail, a perfection of color in some of the shots that make you giddy. Then you try movie mode, and the perfection of the camera's 720p high-definition video blows your mind.
But then you start to notice things.
You were so dazzled, for example, that you didn't notice at first that there's no flash. (The optional external flash is $200.)
Maybe you decide you can live with that -- but then you realize there's no optical viewfinder to peer through, either. (Another option, the snap-on external viewfinder, is $100 and not very functional.) You have to frame your shots using the 3-inch screen. And it's not a great screen, at that. It's hard to see in sunlight.
The sensor inside (12 megapixels) isn't actually that big. Oh, at 0.85 inches diagonal, it's much bigger than the 0.4-inch sensor that's typical in a pocket camera. But it's nowhere close to the 1.12-inch sensor on the similarly priced Nikon D5000 SLR, let alone the 1.7-inch chip in full-frame pro cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II.
You discover that fact as soon as you take pictures indoors, at dusk, or anywhere else but in broad daylight.
It's the old compromise all over again: You get either blur or, if you goose up the ISO, graininess. Less blur or less graininess than you'd get on a shirt-pocket cam, for sure -- but more than on an SLR.
There are other problems, too. The E-P1 offers four different, redundant menu systems, activated by four confusingly similar buttons (labeled OK, Menu, Fn and Info). There's an HDMI jack for easy connection to a hi-def TV -- but would it have been so much trouble to build in a standard mini-USB jack, like every other camera in the world?
The final straw: The E-P1 is slow to focus. Horribly slow -- sometimes two seconds. Its shutter lag is so bad, photos of athletes, passing cars and magical cute-kid shots are almost out of the question. Olympus explains that the E-P1 doesn't have a dedicated autofocus chip, as an SLR does, so it uses the same "contrast-detection" scheme as point-and-shoot cameras.
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