I sold my Olympus E-PL1 away late last week after having it for over a year and shooting about 6,000 pictures on it. I really liked the camera a lot. It was handsome looking, beautiful out of the camera JPGs, VERY reliable (it survived dunking in Niagara Falls!), and I found myself using it more than the D300 to take pictures of Hannah. And that’s to say nothing of that the camera’s a much more discreet device that I can bring around everywhere.
There was a single problem with the little mirrorless compact though, and it was the awful habit of its 14-42mm lens constantly hunting around for the appropriate focus point in low light. When I’m shooting in good light or outdoors, focusing is speedy. But indoors and with a hyper active Hannah, half the shots I took were invariably out of-of-focus. Occasionally that was because of subject motion – Hannah just wasn’t going to sit still while waiting for the lens to decide its optimal focus – but even when Hannah was still, a lot of images still came out blurred for some reason even though at this stage I’ve developed pretty robust camera-holding techniques now.
Our friend Ann owns a similar camera and setup and I remember her remarking that that was a major difficulty for her too. Even Ling disliked using the E-PL1 because of this and preferred using that cheapo Panasonic LZ8 of hers.
For a while I thought it was an issue with the camera, until upon trawling the Internet for notes from other users, discovered that the focusing difficulty was a known problem with this lens and the E-PL1, and there was a revised edition of the 14-42mm (a Mark II) that solved this issue. Moreover, there was some kind of conflict between the lens’ shuttle vibration and lens elements when shot at a focal length range and at certain shuttle speeds, which resulted in vertical blurring (detailed analysis here).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find someone to sell me a used copy of the updated lens, and a new one would have cost about $450 – ouch! Mildly exasperated, I decided to just sell the E-PL1 with the 14-42mm late last week for about half of what I originally paid for a year ago – within 12 hours of posting up the online ad, there were 17 persons all wanting the unit; should have asked for more – and look into an alternative.
More in the next post!
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