Interrogated about the E-P1...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 08:55AM Hello everyone,
I've just been 'interrogated' by my old friend Adam-T from the dpreview forums on the phone... an interesting exercise to quickly summarise the E-P1, here's what I told him - hope it helps to answer the big questions still unanswered.
CDAF - how fast is it?
If you've ever tried to shoot moving kids with the ZD 50 macro and an E-4x0/E-5x0 series camera - that's about the speed of focusing of all lenses on the E-P1. There's not really a huge difference in focusing speed between the ZD range of lenses and m4/3rds lenses - you can read that as good (4/3rds support) or bad (m4/3rds not optimised yet).
The E-P1 is about 75% the speed of the G1, and has 'less sophisticated' CDAF software built in... it doesn't recognise your children, track them across the room and understand the offside rule (joking - that's probably in development though)... what it does do, is simple - highly accurate focusing exactly where you want - and extremely important for me - it does so with every 4/3rds lens available.
So, to summarise for now - think of the E-P1 as a super powerful compact camera in terms of CDAF - and super compact E-620 in terms of features, speed and configurability. It's a *very* powerful photographic tool.
What you will need to do though, is set the camera up to get the best out of CDAF focusing speed - see my post above on that.
More soon, please post a comment below - this diary is directed by your comments and questions!
Kind Regards
Brian
Reader Comments (1)
Brian wrote:
> The E-P1 is about 75% the speed of the G1
I understand that this applies to non-m4/3 lenses as well as m4/3. Does this ratio also hold up in low light? Simon Joinson in his dpreview preview states: "[AF focus speed] in low light at the long end of the zoom is pretty painful". But this was with pre-version-1 firmware.