Olympus E-420 First Look

I always admired the Olympus OM-2 when I first got into into photography in the late 1970s. I could not afford one then, but I gravitated to the smaller, light weight SLR cameras represented by the OM-1 and OM-2. I decided on a camera I could afford, the Fujica ST-605, which was introduced in 1977 and designed along the same compact pattern as the OM-1. When it came time to look for a digital SLR camera, I was impressed by the compact Olympus E-410. I decided on the E-510 because the 410 lacked image stabilization and a few other features. It was aimed at a less serious photographer, although a fine camera in the hands of anyone. At the time, I thought this would make a wonderful "street photography" camera if it had small fixed focal length lens available, especially a thin "pancake" lens.

Olympus has answered our prayers with the E-420. An upgrade of the E-410 with a 25mm f/2.8 pancake lens. The first pictures are out. The pancake looks nice, very much like the lenses Pentax is well known for. I would prefer a similar lens with a wider focal length, about 17mm, which would give an effective field of view of a 35mm lens on a 35mm format camera. This would be the ideal street photography lens in my view. At f/2.8, the lens is fast enough to be useful in evening or available light while avoiding some of the image quality problems faster lenses can introduce (such as poor bokeh). I also love the simple, symmetrical lens designs like the Tessar. These lenses often make up in bokeh for what anything they lose in sharpness.

Minolta MD 45mm Comparison to E-510 Kit Zoom

The MD 45mm f/2.0 has an excellent reputation as a sharp prime lens with good bokeh. I wondered how it compared to the "designed for digital" ZD 40-150mm f/3.5 zoom lens that came with the the E-510 two lens kit.

I shot photographs with the 45mm and the zoom at 45mm as close to f/4 as I could. The result is in my picasa album. This was shot with the MD 45mm at f/4 using manual focus and Live View to adjust focus.

And here is the ZD.

Click on the image to get the larger version. This was shot with the ZD 45-150 @ 45mm f/4.1 in manual focus using Live View.

If you look carefully at the lower edge of the MD picture you can see "La Plata" is clearer than in the ZD image. It appears the MD prime has better edge sharpness than the "telecentric" and "designed for digital" kit zoom. This despite the 45mm was designed for a 35mm camera and is probably at least 20 years old, that its image circle is being cropped to 4/3 and probably extraneous light is bouncing around in the lightbox.

I find Live View at 10x magnification to be more accurate than the unaided eye and more accurate than I used to achieve with a viewfinder with split-prism focusing screen.