Surprisingly, the E-PL1 can be had for relatively attractive prices here in Singapore though the recommended retail price here is SGD998. The unit with the standard 14-42mm lens can be purchased for as low as SGD900, which while is still more expensive than if you buy it off Amazon at USD600, with GST and shipping charges factored in, it’s cheaper in Singapore then.
The store here that offered at that price though had its stock sold out real quick after the recent IT Show, so I picked up my E-PL1, champagne gold-colored edition LOL, from MSColor at SGD940. More expensive yeah but with a couple of freebies thrown in to balance it all up.
Functionally, this digicam can do most of what its more expensive brethren can do – just that you’ll need to jump through a few more hoops. Control dials to do quick image settings have been removed, and are now menu driven instead i.e. more buttons to press. It’s not really that different from Ling’s incredibly configurable LZ8 – and funnily, I really intend my E-PL1 to be mostly used as a dumb point-and-shoot, and will use the adjustable aperture and shuttle speed settings only on occasion. I’ll happily command-dial my E-PL1 to iAuto (photography for dummies) and do the fancy stuff on the D300.
A lot has also been said about the poorer build quality too, compared to metal chassis of the E-P1 (though there’s been contrarian opinion about that e.g. here). Well, once you’ve picked up the E-PL1, there’s indeed no mistaking where corners had to be cut in order to bring down the price point. The chassis does feel all plastic, but fragile it’s not – and if you’ve been living mostly on non-Leica consumer compact cameras, you’d be unlikely to notice the difference anyway.
Unlike the two Olympus pen models too, the new E-PL1 has a built-in popup flash unit. And check this out: the flash unit is even bounce-enabled LOL. The two pictures below show what I mean:
Basically, you use the tip of your left index finger to nudge the spring-loaded popup flash unit, and let its output bounce off the ceiling. This actually works quite well, and while the flash output isn’t really powerful, from initial shots I’ve taken, the bounce actually seems to work quite well for small rooms.
More ramblings and reflections in a later post.:)
Recent comments