Here's a little thinking out loud, after a week with the E-510. Note that
I'm primarily a rangefinder guy. I've had an E-1 for three years, but
never really liked it. I'm feeling much more positive about the E-510.
The E-510 was the result of a nagging feeling, on a several trips and
walks, that maybe in daylight, I could do as well with a DSLR as with an
RF, get more precise framing, and not have to carry around as many bits and
pieces of kit. Just one camera and a good moderate zoom, an extra battery
and maybe a polarizer, and all's well. Autofocus negates one of my main
lifelong issues with SLRs--I just don't focus well manually with
them. With an RF, I'm confident. With a manual focus SLR, I hem and haw,
and sometimes I don't nail it.
So was it worth it? As with so many things, the answer is "yes, but."
Obviously, for tele or macro, an SLR is much better. But with a DSLR,
there is a trade-off between image quality, low light noise levels and
operational speed vs. size and weight. So many of the things for which we
used to buy a different kind of film now require a different camera body to
do truly well.
I don't like big and heavy. So while I probably would do better with a 5D
or 1D(s)Mark-x or a D3(00), that's not the route I wanted to take. I
decided to stick with Olympus. The E-3 is big, heavy, and expensive. So I
decided get a smaller, supposedly consumer model with image stabilization.
A lightly-used E-510 appealed to my bottom-feeder instincts--last year's
model at a price I couldn't refuse.
So far, I'm not disappointed. The E-510 is a wonderful general-purpose
camera. But there are limitations. Detail wise, the antialias-less M8 and
a Summicron eats the E-510's lunch. No comparison. All 10 megapixels are
not created equal, and I can see the difference clearly on the screen. But
that extra detail doesn't matter so much at normal print sizes (letter size
or smaller). So the E-510 is good enough much of the time.
Noise is not as big an issue as the pixel peepers on dpreview would have us
believe, but it is there. The Olympus doesn't have the squeaky-clean ISO
200 and 400 (320/640) files the M8 does. Again, a little judicious noise
reduction in the RAW converter and you're OK, but it does take some thought
balancing the scene, the noise and the need for finest detail. Quite a bit
better than the E-1, though. ISO 800 is quite usable, but I'm not sure I'd
want to use 1600 much. How much of a problem all this will be once the
grayer days return to the Pacific Northwest remains to be seen.
Blown highlights is a bit of an issue, but really only a little more than
any other DSLR. Frankly, digital sucks in this respect. In a scene with a
sunlit background and deep shaded subject, you're screwed. You can blow
the background, or you can try pulling the dark parts out of the mud, with
resultant color shifts, noise and posterization. The M8 is about the best
digital camera I've seen in this respect, and even it gets challenged. Oh,
for a digital sensor with the latitude of color negative film, or even
Tri-X, where you could expose for the important parts of the scene and burn
in the bright stuff (or scan twice for bright and dark and merge).
Shooting speed: The E-510 is no sports camera. The autofocus is not fast
enough for the action at the local skateboard park. Which means manually
focusing on a spot and waiting for the action to come to it, or setting up
continuous autofocus or AF lock for such things. Since I'm not a sports
shooter, I don't care much. I trust my own eyes and the M rangefinder
better for ordinary decisive-moment photography sometimes, but the E-510 is
good enough most of the time.
Viewfinder: Too small, very hard to manually focus. The jury's still out
over whether I will get a Katz Eye screen for focusing my old OM teles,
live with it, or spring for a new tele zoom.
Ergonomics: The E-1 was better. More dedicated buttons, and, two control
dials to the E-510's one. I like the E-510's feel in the hand better than
the E-1. Neither come close to a film M or an M8 with a Thumbs-Up.
On the E-510's plus side, it is versatile. It has image stabilization,
which does nice things with my old OM teles. It takes stunning macros with
my old OM 50/3.5 macro. It does most of the things I wanted a reasonably
current DSLR for, and most of the things it doesn't do, the M8 does, Or I
don't care about them enough to throw a couple of thousand dollars at them,
and change systems in the bargain. As a real-world compromise, so far, so
good,
--Peter
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