I have been longing for a smaller, easier camera to carry around, that can still take useful pictures, for a long time. The buildup to the launch of the Digital Pen, Olympus E-P1, had me scouring the internet day by day for some small thread of information. And now that it’s out, even if it of course doesn’t fulfill all my hopes and expectations (no coupled VF…), I just had to have it.

And yesterday I got it. I got the 14-42 kit. The pancake, OVF and flash are on backorder.

My very first initial reaction is that I really like the “feel” of the camera body, it exudes quality in a way compacts or entry-level DSLRs don’t. The lens, however, is plasticy in the same way as most kit lenses are.

The autofocus seems reasonably snappy outdoors or daytime indoors, clearly faster than my Ixus, and it hasn’t missfocused yet. I haven’t had a chance to test it in any really tough situation yet, however. Off to picture taken is about 3 seconds (which I find OK), and so is picture-to-picture (not so great, if you miss your first shot you might loose the moment completely). Shutter lag with focus locked seems negligible.

The biggest initial problem (as expected) is the lack of a real viewfinder, in overcast weather it works perfectly fine (except my muscle memory keeps moving the camera up to my eye… it feels wrong holding a real camera, one hand on the lens, out in front of me). In bright light, however, it’s almost unusable. In these situations, with my old Ixus, I would just point the camera in the right direction and snap away “blind”, but with a camera such as this I would like to have more control of the results…

This said, I don’t expect it to replace either my Ixus (this camera certainly isn’t “pocketable”) nor my full size DSLR, but rather slot in between them, and for anyone in my situation I expect it to work brilliantly on total. Anyone looking for a single camera, however, ought to think hard about either entry level DSLRs or top level pocketable compacts instead.