The Olympus Pen-F Is A Classic Film Camera With Digital Guts

If you appreciate to read photography weblogs, this one should come as no real surprise. But at least right now it's official: Olympus is resurrecting one of its flagship film rangefinders, this Pen F, as a mirrorless camera.

The new Pen-F will be available in the us in early March, will definitely cost $1, 199, and — if you want lots of knobs along with brushed metal finishes — it could be one of your favourite cameras of 2016.

The Olympus Pen-F Is A Classic Film Camera With Digital Guts

Not surprisingly, the Pen-F won't contain a full-frame sensor the size of any 35mm piece of movie. But it is getting an upgrade from your 16-megapixel chip Olympus may be using in its scaled-down cameras lately. Instead, the Pen-F posseses an all-new 20-megapixel Micro Several Thirds sensor. (That's still bigger than the 1-inch sensor entirely on cameras like the Sony RX100, but smaller than the APS-C sensors found throughout entry-level DSLRs or in Fujifilm's X compilation of cameras. ) Putting APS-C detectors in mirrorless cameras has changed into a trend in the last 24 months, but making the Pen-F a new Micro Four Thirds camera keeps the use of Olympus' deep well associated with compatible lenses.


Sensor to one side, the Pen-F should certainly be a worthy competitor to interchangeable lens cameras such as the Fujifilm X-T1 and X-T10. It shares identical resolution OLED electronic viewfinder (2. thirty seven million dots, though the opening around the Olympus one feels a little small), and it includes a 3-inch touchscreen on the rear that swivels. It's Wi-Fi outfitted, and it's also so light i always thought the battery was missing as i first picked it up throughout a brief hands-on event a little while ago.

The Pen-F has identical 5-axis image stabilization located on the older Olympus Pen E-P5 and the newer (and even smaller) E-M10 Indicate II. Five-axis stabilization is definitely an important and attractive feature — it produces much easier low mild shooting, lets you help to make longer exposures, and helps get rid of the image blurring that originates from shaky hands. Companies like Olympus along with Sony are building this feature within their camera bodies right right now, and it's a huge advantage the way it makes the feature available for every lens you attach to the camera.

The Pen-F is also a tightly designed camera that doesn't waste any space with its small chassis. It comes in gold or black — the two standard looks where current throwback designs head out — and really appears like a much less boring Pen E-P5. There are metal knobs galore on top, a grippy rubber belt across the middle, and a shutter button that appears like it's from another era.


But there's more towards Pen-F than just popular styling. Olympus made sure you will find no visible screws. It hid a cable release inside shutter button. The camera also includes a dedicated color profile knob around the front for quick transferring between black-and-white and other presets. There's a lot taking place here, but it's done in such a careful way that this Pen-F doesn't look while garish or crowded as some of the cameras in Olympus' OM-D range.

The Olympus Pen-F Is A Classic Film Camera With Digital Guts

The back side with the 3-inch LCD uses of which same rubberized material as other body, so when anyone flip it over the item and close it, the camera looks even more like it came from your 1960s. The new Pen-F absolutely doesn't look as radical as the original film version, but it's really a sharp looking camera, and it's just about the most attractive designs Olympus provides ever released.

Olympus has built plenty of clever software features into several of its other recent mirrorless cameras, and a number ones will show up inside Pen-F, too. For case, users will be capable to select autofocus points while they're shooting by moving their thumb around the touchscreen — something that had been pioneered on the E-M10 Indicate II. The EVF may also simulate what a non-electronic viewfinder would certainly see, giving you enable you to better judge what to be able to expose for without allowing you to pull your head far from the camera. And the Pen-F comes with a "high res shot" function that, when you use a tripod, actually moves the sensor among shutter releases so that you can build a massive 50-megapixel impression.

The Pen-F is also very powerful for the small size. It can shoot ORGANIC images at 10 frames per second, or up to 20 while using the electronic shutter. The shutter can stay open providing 60 seconds on its very own, or snap a image in as fast as 1/16000th of any second. While the Pen-F doesn't have some of the signature features on Olympus' even larger, more expensive cameras (like weatherproofing), the new camera should be extremely capable.

Canon and Nikon get fallen behind the trend of mirrorless cameras, that is left room for corporations like Olympus and Fujifilm to generate really attractive cameras at nearly identical price point as a entry-level DSLR. The new Pen-F will likely be another weapon in this Olympus arsenal, but it also could just be its best one but.