I've just done a test of RAW conversion using the High Function and High Speed options. I applied zero sharpening in Olympus Studio, and then used PhotoKit to apply capture sharpening. I read RémiG's article on sharpening. I can't reproduce his results: In my case (a winter landscape, similar in type to his test image), there is a slight difference in the results. The HF version seems to have a little extra edge contrast, but it is marginal and only really discernable at 200%. What is slightly more worrying to me is that the two versions have slightly different colour casts. Possibly this has something to do with the (reported) poor color management implementation. But certainly I don't see this "painterly" effect he reports. On this evidence, I don't see much point in HF. However, it will be interesting to look at the results of upsizing. It is possible that HF has slightly more detail. Either way, I'd say that Olympus Viewer and Olympus Studio are two good reasons not to buy an E-1. They're not totally unusable - and maybe are better than Canon's efforts - but they're really not very impressive. If my software team produced this sort of stuff their next career move would be selling burgers...

Just for fun I thought I'd register my E-1 with Olympus. Seems like a good idea, doesn't it ? Of course you'll only know you can do if you've managed to find a link in the twisted maze of web sites that Olympus has managed to publish so far.

Starting from what appears to be supposed to be the main site now, you can follow a registration link (at the top right), which brings up a form which some genius has decided should be implemented in Flash (and is served from a Japanese domain). This has 9 steps (screens). When you get to screen 2, if you're in Europe or the US, you'll find that you can't select your country. You click on "other countries", and, hey presto, you're dumped here. You select your country, and depending on the selection, fun things happen. If you select Switzerland, you end up in the olympus-pro.com world, rather than e-system.com, but you can't actually register your product. You can however sign up for a newsletter, which apparently is in German. Olympus realise that Belgium, for example, is multilingual, but in Switzerland they haven't noticed yet. Never mind. If you choose "United Kingdom" instead (going back first, not from the drop-down, that takes you somewhere else..) then hey presto you can register your equipment, using an HTML form, and choose any damn country you want. Progress! And it tells you "because we know what you have, we can inform you about the new firmware updates you require". Well I'll believe that when I see it. However you do get an email response thanking you for your application to the Olympus E-membership programmes, which you may well not be aware you'd submitted.


Has anybody got bored enough to work out if there is any logic behind all this ? I assume that http://www.olympus-esystem.com/dea/ is the main site, but really I'm far from sure - http://www.olympus-esystem.com has a different design and doesn't appear to link to /dea, whatever "dea" stands for, and Europe links all end up at http://www.olympus-pro.com.


I'm baffled.

With the first photos comes the first photo-processing. I've installed both the Olympus Viewer and the Olympus Studio Trial software on my desktop machine, which is an Apple Macintosh G4 867Mhz "Quicksilver", with 1.5Gb of RAM and as much disk space as my whole University had back in 1983 😊

As I said before, applying the 1.0.1 updater to Olympus Viewer stops it working. A pity because it claims to solve 1 annoying bug, which is that converted RAW files are saved without colour profiles. I haven't tried it on my Powerbook yet. The announced 1.1 updater does not yet appear to have arrived.

Apart from a mysterious "High Speed / High Function" RAW development engine tradeoff in Studio (the manual has little to say about it, despite being 292 pages long), it seems that unless you want edit tools and camera control, and find RAW batch processing useful, Studio has little to offer over Viewer. In any case, they're both quite clearly version 1.0. Whilst they offer a lot of interesting functionality, they're both clunky and slow, especially in RAW conversion. Roll on the E-1 updated to Photoshop CS.

The RAW developer is especially annoying. Whilst files can be saved using the same file name as the RAW (with the appropriate filetype, so it doesn't overwrite anything), or saved using a rule-based formula, you can't, believe it or not, enter your own filename. Secondly, the type always defaults to Exif-JPEG. Finally (so far), if you ask it to open the converted file in Photoshop, if Photoshop is already open, Viewer crashes - after saving the file, fortunately.

But... the results are pretty good. At 240dpi I get more less full A4 (using no margins on Epson 2100). Images straight "out of the box", capture and output sharpened using Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener and printed using ColorByte ImagePrint are pretty impressive. No tweaking, no optimising. Next step is to go to A3.

I think that Josh Anon's Lightbox software is worth investigating too, certainly for organising all the various derivatives of the RAW files. I daresay that will be the topic of a future post.

For anybody wanting to experiment, a RAW file and associated JPEG of a Swiss mountain peak can be found online here.

The blue sky was very transitory...

The photo was taken handheld, at 100ASA, 54mm, 1/250th, F9, using ESP metering. The metering coped pretty well.

So, no post yesterday. Circumstances, for example shovelling snow, kept me away. Today, however, the E-1 has leapt into action. Taking advantage of a business trip over the Alps, I stopped off at a few places to try it out. The weather was still both foul and boring, but there were a few better moments. I just used the 14-54mm lens for these first trials.

I'll post some photos soon, when I decide how I'm going to organise it. But my first impressions are very good. First of all, I'm relieved to report that I like the 4/3 framing. I expected to, having taken to 6x7 very quickly, but you never no. Next point, this camera just works. The learning curve, even when coming from manual focus Canon SLRs, is practically non-existent. Most controls work on the "press a button and rotate a dial basis", with the added feature that you have two dials to choose from. So far I've only discovered one mode where the two dials do different things, which is setting aperture and speed in M mode. The comment that the buttons seem to be randomly spread all over the camera has some justification, but you soon get used to it. I found that the DOF preview button didn't immediately fall to hand, but again, after a few minutes it became second nature.

The viewfinder is superb. It does not feel at all restrictive. I don't know quite why, because it clearly is much smaller than the one on my T90 for example, but it isn't noticeable. However, I think investing in the eye cup might improve things even more.

On the menu front, well again it is easy to use, but I should say that I have been using an Olympus C4040Z for the past two years, and the logic is similar. One thing which I haven't seen reported anywhere is that the Info mode "remembers" its last setting. So, if you choose histogram view (requiring click Play, press and hold Info, rotate dial) the exit, the next time you click Play then Info, you get the histogram. Not quite such a pain in the neck as some have suggested. I guess a single button press, like on other DSLRs, would be nice, but this is hardly awkward.

One thing I haven't taken much notice of yet is changing the default settings. Apart from changing the colour space to Adobe RGB I've left it all as it is. I may well be wrong but so far I assume that all of this stuff is relevant only to processed images, not RAW. Still, as I've using RAW + JPEG, I will probably tweak the settings so that it produces JPEGs as I want them.

For some shots I used my tripod, with the Acratech ball head. I used a Really Right Stuff plate - model ..., which I bought for the T90. It isn't ideal as the curved base of the E-1 body doesn't fit very well. Really Right Stuff claim to have released an E-1 specific plate, but when you try to order it, a different, generic (and cheaper) plate ends up in the shopping basket. I'll call them tonight to clarify this.