My tale really starts with this picture:
http://tinyurl.com/ynqmdz
Which I took on my first outing with the E-3 back in December. You'll
notice it's not aligned perfectly, it's rotated ant-clockwise
slightly. This bothered me a bit, because I was sure I'd paid special
attention to alignment at the time. I let it pass and resolved to pay
more attention in future. But then I kept noticing that I seemed to
have lost the knack of holding a camera level, not that I considered
myself particularly skilled there, but I noticed a difference. Then
there was TOPE 33. That one came out straight. I used live view for
that. Hmm, I tried an experiment.
I found a piece of old worktop with a nice orthogonal pattern on it,
set up the E-3/50mm f/2 macro pointing straight down at it (used a
spirit level), aligned the pattern with the image edges using live
view and took a picture. Here it is, shrunk to 1600x1200 pixels.
http://tinyurl.com/2sekcr
Perfectly aligned, I hope you'll agree. Then I opened the eyepiece
shutter and looked through the optcal viewfinder. It was noticeably
out of alignment, so I rotated the camera (using the geared head)
until it was back in alignment and took another picture. This is what
the sensor saw:
http://tinyurl.com/37ztth
Now that just doesn't look straight to me - and obviously isn't if you
check the bottom and right edges. It's also rotated anti-clockwise by
about the same angle as that picture of the brigde tower I started
with, so enough to spoil a composition where alignment is critical.
For comparison, I tried the E-300 using the same lens. After aligning
in live view, I couldn't see any misalignment in the viewfinder, so
I deliberately rotated the camera and then realigned it by eye. These
are the results. Without looking at the filenames, I can't tell which
is which.
http://tinyurl.com/3cczz8
http://tinyurl.com/36m8wx
They're both very very slightly out in an anticlockwise directon, but
I'll take the blame for that.
Have I found another teethng trouble with the E-3? Am I being too
critical? I've now convinced myself that I *can* tell when the
camera's level, but what's the point if it's going to record a rotated
image anyway? My gut feeling is that this should not be regarded as
acceptable in a camera costing £1099, so I'm going to report my
findings to Olympus anyway.
Oh, one other observation - when I swapped cameras there was no
discernible difference in the image alignment between the optical
viewfinders of th E-3 and E-330, which suggests a misaligned sensor in
the E-3.
Anyone else found anything similar? with any SLR?
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|