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[OM] E-510 for a Leica M shooter

Subject: [OM] E-510 for a Leica M shooter
From: Peter Klein <pklein@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:19:07 -0700
Here's a little thinking out loud, after a week with the E-510.  Note that 
I'm primarily a rangefinder guy.  I've had an E-1 for three years, but 
never really liked it.  I'm feeling much more positive about the E-510.

The E-510 was the result of a nagging feeling, on a several trips and 
walks, that maybe in daylight, I could do as well with a DSLR as with an 
RF, get more precise framing, and not have to carry around as many bits and 
pieces of kit. Just one camera and a good moderate zoom, an extra battery 
and maybe a polarizer, and all's well.  Autofocus negates one of my main 
lifelong issues with SLRs--I just don't focus well manually with 
them.  With an RF, I'm confident.  With a manual focus SLR, I hem and haw, 
and sometimes I don't nail it.

So was it worth it?  As with so  many things, the answer is "yes, but."

Obviously, for tele or macro, an SLR is much better.  But with a DSLR, 
there is a trade-off between image quality, low light noise levels and 
operational speed vs. size and weight.  So many of the things for which we 
used to buy a different kind of film now require a different camera body to 
do truly well.

I don't like big and heavy. So while I probably would do better with a 5D 
or 1D(s)Mark-x or a D3(00), that's not the route I wanted to take.  I 
decided to stick with Olympus.  The E-3 is big, heavy, and expensive.  So I 
decided get a smaller, supposedly consumer model with image stabilization. 
A lightly-used E-510 appealed to my bottom-feeder instincts--last year's 
model at a price I couldn't refuse.

So far, I'm not disappointed. The E-510 is a wonderful general-purpose 
camera. But there are limitations.  Detail wise, the antialias-less M8 and 
a Summicron eats the E-510's lunch.  No comparison.  All 10 megapixels are 
not created equal, and I can see the difference clearly on the screen.  But 
that extra detail doesn't matter so much at normal print sizes (letter size 
or smaller).  So the E-510 is good enough much of the time.

Noise is not as big an issue as the pixel peepers on dpreview would have us 
believe, but it is there.  The Olympus doesn't have the squeaky-clean ISO 
200 and 400 (320/640) files the M8 does. Again, a little judicious noise 
reduction in the RAW converter and you're OK, but it does take some thought 
balancing the scene, the noise and the need for finest detail.  Quite a bit 
better than the E-1, though.  ISO 800 is quite usable, but I'm not sure I'd 
want to use 1600 much.  How much of a problem all this will be once the 
grayer days return to the Pacific Northwest remains to be seen.

Blown highlights is a bit of an issue, but really only a little more than 
any other DSLR.  Frankly, digital sucks in this respect.  In a scene with a 
sunlit background and deep shaded subject, you're screwed.  You can blow 
the background, or you can try pulling the dark parts out of the mud, with 
resultant color shifts, noise and posterization.  The M8 is about the best 
digital camera I've seen in this respect, and even it gets challenged.  Oh, 
for a digital sensor with the latitude of color negative film, or even 
Tri-X, where you could expose for the important parts of the scene and burn 
in the bright stuff (or scan twice for bright and dark and merge).

Shooting speed: The E-510 is no sports camera.  The autofocus is not fast 
enough for the action at the local skateboard park.  Which means manually 
focusing on a spot and waiting for the action to come to it, or setting up 
continuous autofocus or AF lock for such things.  Since I'm not a sports 
shooter, I don't care much.  I trust my own eyes and the M rangefinder 
better for ordinary decisive-moment photography sometimes, but the E-510 is 
good enough most of the time.

Viewfinder:  Too small, very hard to manually focus.  The jury's still out 
over whether I will get a Katz Eye screen for focusing my old OM teles, 
live with it, or spring for a new tele zoom.

Ergonomics:  The E-1 was better.  More dedicated buttons, and, two control 
dials to the E-510's one.  I like the E-510's feel in the hand better than 
the E-1.  Neither come close to a film M or an M8 with a Thumbs-Up.

On the E-510's plus side, it is versatile. It has image stabilization, 
which does nice things with my old OM teles.  It takes stunning macros with 
my old OM 50/3.5 macro.  It does most of the things I wanted a reasonably 
current DSLR for, and most of the things it doesn't do, the M8 does, Or I 
don't care about them enough to throw a couple of thousand dollars at them, 
and change systems in the bargain.  As a real-world compromise, so far, so 
good,

--Peter


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