New Camera!

· 20 December 2019, 13:32 · photography

I gave myself a new camera for Christmas! When I found out that Olympus had a special offer on the PEN-F kit I couldn't resist, especially given that the PEN-F is no longer being manufactured and it's unlikely that there will be a successor model.

People who follow my photography site will know that I'm a huge fan of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 II, so what's with the PEN-F now? Actually the two cameras complement each other nicely: The E-M5 II is a solid weather-sealed workhorse which (especially with the battery grip) works great with bigger lenses such as the magnificent m.Zuiko PRO 12-100mm/4, while the PEN-F with its additional creative tools is very compact and goes well with the small prime lenses like the 17mm/1.8 or 45mm/1.8.

The main differences in handling between the PEN-F and the E-M5 II are:

  • The PEN-F has a dedicated third wheel to the right of the shutter-release button for exposure bias. On the E-M5 II, there's usually one wheel to control the “free” parameter of whichever auto mode you're using (such as the aperture in aperture-priority mode) or “program shift”, while the other wheel controls exposure bias. On the PEN-F, there's a separate wheel for exposure bias so especially in “M” mode you have two wheels left for aperture and exposure time.
  • There's a little lever below the mode-setting wheel that lets you get at the highlight/shadow control more quickly (on the E-M5 II this is usually on a button, depending on how the camera is set up). This is especially useful when using the “creative dial” (see below). The highlight/shadow control now also lets you control the “mid-tones” from a control point in the middle of the curve.
  • There's a dedicated “magnify” button that lets you get at the focus magnifier when shooting with non-autofocus lenses. (Of course this could be reassigned to do something else instead.)

But the really interesting thing that the PEN-F has over the E-M5 II is the “creative dial”, which sits on the front of the body to the right of the lens, roughly where traditional SLRs would have the lever for the self-timer. Apart from the central “off” position, this wheel has four settings:

  • The ART setting gives you access to the art filters, which in the E-M5 you would select via the mode-setting wheel or the shooting-mode menu. The cool thing is, while on the E-M5 art filters use “P” mode (with shifting) unless you pick the art filter from the shooting-mode menu (which is mildly inconvenient), on the PEN-F you get to use whichever mode you select on the mode-setting wheel together with whatever art filter you pick via the creative dial. This is more intuitive. In addition, there is now a “flat” menu for all art filters including the variations, and scrolling through the menu actually applies the currently-selected art filter to the live-view image as a “preview”. This is also very convenient because it saves you a lot of toggling back and forth between the art filter menu and the live-view image. Again, on the E-M5 II this isn't an issue if you use the shooting-mode setting from the SCP to select an art filter.

  • The CRT setting is the “colour creator” which is also available on the E-M5 II. Again, the “creative dial” makes this very conveniently accessible; on the E-M5 II you'd either have to “sacrifice” a button or use the multipurpose button to get at it. On the PEN-F, the colour creator no longer forces auto white balance but lets you set the white balance separately, which offers more creative possibilities.

  • The COLOR setting gives you access to a new control that lets you independently increase or decrease the saturation of several colours at the same time. This is a major thing and I'm looking forward to experimenting with this further.

  • The MONO setting is essentially art filter 5 on steroids: It gives you a monochrome image with a colour-filter selection wheel (with multiple intensities for each filter) plus a film-grain simulation ranging from “no grain at all” to “loads of grain”.

The nice thing is that the PEN-F remembers the settings of all of these separately, along with any modifications to the gradation curve you may have made, and indeed offers three independent storage slots each for COLOR and MONO, which are selectable via the shooting-mode setting in the SCP. In addition, these settings are also stored in the custom modes, of which 3 are directly selectable from the mode-setting wheel (4 if you don't use the “C4” position to access the scene modes).

The fact that the PEN-F has a 20-megapixel sensor to the E-M5 II's 16-megapixel one is something that I don't find all that important; I am quite happy with the E-M5 II's images and it doesn't make a big difference either way. A nice touch is that the PEN-F uses the same type of battery as the E-M5 II, so I won't need to keep track of different spares and chargers.

So in effect, the PEN-F is really made for a different sort of photography - you have to engage even more with your motif to figure out what to do and how to bring out whatever effect you want to create. It's easy to see how this camera didn't really catch on, because I suspect that many people tend to be overwhelmed with all the additional settings and possibilities (and perhaps they just prefer to use Photoshop after the fact, but there's a lot to be said for being able to see how the images come out while you're out shooting).

I'll obviously keep the E-M5 II, which is a great camera, for holidays and other situations where I'd like to use the zoom lenses or convenient “portrait shutter release” on the battery grip, and don't mind carrying a bag of gear. But I'm looking forward to having the PEN-F, probably with the 17mm/1.8 prime, on me most of the time for spontaneous photography or little voyages of creative discovery.

If you want to see the first few photographs I took with the PEN-F, pop over to my gallery page!