Hi Gang,
I was in Looking Glass at Berkeley today get buy another blower bulb
for blowing dust off the CCD of my 1D today, and noticed the new E-1
on the shelf. I grabbed a CF card from the briefcase, and took some
frames with it which I will post a link to later today. The photos
will just be snapshots, as I could only take the camera out the door
of the store and shoot on the street in front.
First impressions:
Beautiful build quality, very nice weight and feel to the camera. The
dial at the top has an interlock which you must press to go from
Manual to Aperture or Shutter or Program priority modes. The shutter
button fell to place nicely and had a nice feel. The shutter sound is
quiet but discernable. The door to the CF compartment is nicely
sealed, and has a nice positive lock on it and the door works
smoothly. The 14-55 (I'm pretty sure that's what it was) lens
reminded me of my C*n*n 28-135, smaller, but similar high
quality,with a somewhat plasticky feel. I think the lens barrel is
plastic, but I may be wrong. The inner barrel that racks out feels
like plastic, anyway....
Firing it up, the camera boots up very quickly, as fast as a Canon
1D. Shooting in aperture priority inside the store, the camera has
quite a bit of trouble autofocussing in room light that is somewhat
low, but not what I would call dim. The lens would rack in and out a
no. of times trying to find focus. It eventually did, but it took a
while. By contrast, my 1D locks focus almost immediately in a room
with considerably less light. Outside, things were better, the camera
found focus pretty quickly on stationary objects. I took some panning
photos of cars just going 25-35 mph down Telegraph Avenue, and as you
will see in the photo when I post them, the camera had trouble
focussing on some of them.This reminds me of the autofocus behavior
of E-10s, where you need to trap focus manually to nail anything
moving, even fairly slowly. The other thing notable in the few
minutes that I used the camera was that the write times from the
capture buffer to the card were *really* slow...I was using a
Professional grade 24X Lexar CF card; not the fastest card I own,
but no slouch, either, and the time I had to wait for the camera's
red light to stop writing data to the card was notable. Again, this
reminds me of E-10 and E-20 behavior. I used this card in my D60 and
1D, and it gets written to way faster than the E-1 does. Also, there
sometimes seemed to be a notable shutter lag when depressing the
shutter even after focus-lock, like the camera was still trying to
figure out what to do...I found this surprising given how fast the
E-10 and E-20 shutter releases are. Lastly, there is also a notable
lag on the image review LCD after shooting a frame. I can only think
once again, this is due to slow I/O from the card to the camera. As
the C*n*n 10D is this camera major competition, a comparison is worth
mentioning. While the build quality and heft and feel of the E-1 is
possibly a touch nicer than the 10D, the E-1 doesn't have the
autofocus accuracy, autofocus speed, buffer to card write speed,
image review speed or as good a controls interface as the 10D. Or for
that matter, the resolution and image quality advantages of a CMOS
sensor. Overall, it's a nice camera, but at a price higher than a
C*n*n 10D, all I can say is that C*n*n has nothing to worry about.
I will post photos a bit later today, and post a message here with the link.
-Stephen.
--
2001 CBR600F4i - Fantastic!
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