Olympus E-P2 Compact System Camera (14-42mm lens & VF-2 electronic viewfinder) Black

Product Information

The E-P2 was replaced in Olympus' PEN line by the Olympus PEN E-P3 which was announced in June 2011. You’re looking at about approximately 1MB per second of footage in the HD mode, with each clip limited to a maximum file size of 2GB; Olympus estimates this will get you around seven minutes of HD footage or 14 minutes in the VGA mode.

The E-P2 is, like its sibling, not only easy to use but also fun with it, and while there are creative options to dip in and out of, users can simply leave the camera on iAuto and take above par snapshots if so desired. The Olympus E-P2 lets you dial in shutter speeds of up to 60 seconds and has a Bulb mode as well for exposure times as long as 30 minutes, which is very good news if you are seriously interested in night photography. In the PASM modes this displays, among other things, the exposure settings at the bottom of the screen flanked by the currently selected shooting mode and the remaining picture capacity.The EP-2 added an Accessory Port, a power and communication port, which allowed the use of various accessories, such as an external stereo microphone for HD video recording. It's here we find the AF tracking option along with the expected single or continuous AF, plus manual AF options.

The VF-2 offers the same 800x600 pixel resolution as the unit that appears in the Panasonic G1, GH1 and G2 but makes each pixel up of three dots (red, green and blue), rather than the Panasonic's field sequential display that draws each color one after the other. This works very similarly to the AF tracking option on the Lumix GF1, although for easier initial aiming, you should also set the AF to a single area, otherwise the E-P2 will have to guess at what you’re hoping to follow from its 11 areas. Up to and including ISO 400 it's a clean bill of health, with noise creeping into shadow areas at ISO 800 and extending across the entirety of the image at ISO 1600. You can see an example of shooting in Manual mode in the lower of our two video clips to the left – it shows the E-P2 manually focusing from one subject to another with a shallow depth-of-field using the 17mm pancake lens at f2. In our tests, the GF1’s face detection also proved more reliable than the E-P2, with the Olympus often focusing just in front of the identified face when the subject was turned slightly.It snapped-into focus after a moment, making it fine for subjects which paused after moving or for minor adjustments in composition, but anything moving quickly and continuously could be lost.

With 460 thousand pixels the E-PL2’s 3 inch LCD screen provides a crisp clear image on which to compose and frame subjects.Against its closest competitor – Panasonic’s GF1– there’s not much to divide the two cameras, so we pitched them in a head to head.

Hopping over to the other side of the hotshoe we again find a shooting mode wheel recessed into the top plate, keeping the Micro Thirds E-series more streamlined than its Panasonic rival. Because of the way viewfinders are measured (using a fixed lens, rather than a lens of equivalent magnification), you also need to take the sensor size into account, so the numbers in the diagram below are the manufacturer's specified magnifications divided by the respective 'crop factors'. It should also be noted the extra bulk of the VF-2 mounted on the E-P2 didn’t prevent it from fitting in any of the bags or pockets we’d used with the camera body alone.Next to this on the Olympus is a large raised shutter release button with a nicely definite halfway point - the camera lightning fast in determining focus and exposure when pressed. This gives the Olympus the advantage that it doesn't suffer from the 'tearing' that can occur if you move the Panasonics quickly (meaning that the camera is trying to draw a slightly different scene by the time is updates each different color, giving vertical objects a red, green and blue edge for a split second). Over the next two pages we'll look at the differences and test whether there's any difference in image quality. Plus, at the same time it thought that this might also be an opportunity to perform a few operational nip and tucks to justify its introduction as a ‘new' model.