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Re: [OM] RANT: Sample images taken with EP-1

Subject: Re: [OM] RANT: Sample images taken with EP-1
From: Joel Wilcox <jfwilcox@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:34:00 -0500
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Well, let's put things into perspective.  I never had a Pen, and probably
> never will. I do believe that Olympus is doing a brilliant move here and
> playing on the heritage of Olympus.  Why not?

Because the Facebook crowd could hardly care less and the twits won't tweet.

> After all, the full-blown 4/3
> lineup has been anything but earth-shattering. Shall I regurgitate my
> disdain for 4/3 and the current design criteria?  Olympus did a few things
> right with the E-1, which is why I still use it, but for everything right, I
> can point to two things so wrong as to be laughable. So it is quiet, it
> feels good in the hand, and has good image color.  Anything else?

Live view, supersonic whizbangs, economic aspect ratio for print,
outstanding lenses, articulating LCD.  You owe me 10 laughable items.

> Frankly, It isn't until Olympus rediscovers what it was about the OM system
> which was so successful that Olympus will start building DSLRs that I give a
> rip for. The Pen system was EXTREMELY successful in its day.  Olympus
> rediscovered what was successful about the Pen and is trying to revisit it
> today with the E-P1.

That may be true, but it offers up Pen as an example not as the
essence of its hoped-for success.  The salient quality carried over
from Pen is the size, and the e-p  was going to be small anyway.  The
Pen angle is a gimmick that makes for copy in a trade magazine.  I
just find it a snooze.

> In the next day or two, I will be posting a big opinion piece on Zone-10
> about the E-P1. In a nutshell, I believe the camera is a brilliant design
> and marketing decision and WILL be a top seller. I also believe that it is
> extremely revolutionary in one very very specific area which few in the
> industry can grasp--not even Olympus.  Up till now, the time for the m43
> format wasn't right.  As Joel indicates, the time is  right for the
> pack-animals to realize that there is life beyond battery-grip equipped
> monsters with 70-200/2.8 big-whites hanging off the nose.

I hope your piece will get beyond the superficiality of the e-p/Pen
comparisons currently.  If the Great Unwashed (I'll include myself in
this group) have to be educated about the teleological perfection of
the original Pen in order to appreciate what Olympus is doing in m4/3,
I don't think that's going to make it with even the most hardened OM
partisan (not this one, anyway).  This is nothing against Pen in
itself, it's against the essential irrelevance of the comparison.

When I try to reduce the Olympus legacy to a few salient
characteristics, I am always dissatisfied.  I could say it is the
size, but that's not precisely it because, for example, admiration for
the 85/2 doesn't diminish my love for the big honking 90/2.  OM just
seems to surprise me with the quality of many of its features, each in
itself perhaps less than what this or that competitor provides, but
taken together, providing a coherence which is greater than the sum of
the parts -- absolutely full of compromises, of course, but fully
justified in the way the tool is or can be used and experienced.  I
experience a good deal of the same thing in the E-system.  I hope and
fully expect that people will experience the same with the e-p and I
can't wait to hear from real people about it.  I will not be at the
front of the line for m4/3, but then I never am.

Joel W.
-- 
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