This was the first serious digital camera employed by the Platypus Paparazzi Photography Team in 2012.
Given I’ve had a couple of years to play with this camera I felt it reasonable to add my experience with it from a real world perspective.
The Olympus EPM-1 Mini with 12-42 and 40-150mm Twin Lens Kit is a very lightweight, portable compact system, mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with a 12 megapixel CMOS Sensor.
This camera crams an impressive array of features into such a small package including the capacity to capture RAW images (or ORF – Olympus Raw Files – Olympus’s equivalent of RAW) which is a huge bonus for such a small form factor camera.
This has been an excellent camera as an entry level to more advanced features of digital photography and the photo quality in good lighting or when using a tripod is exceptional.
The camera is light and very compact, with a high quality rear LCD screen.
Coupled with a Fish Eye Lens and some in camera filter effects images such as the bridge in the above shot can be achieved with ease.
There is no viewfinder on this camera which is a hard sell once you experience the viewfinder of the higher end camera models, but the rear LCD screen is more than adequate for most shooting scenarios.
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The lack of traditional dials for manual adjustment of aperture, shutter speed, white balance, etc can be a little frustrating if you have used a traditional DSLR style camera, however the LCD based Super Control Panel simplifies some of these control issues and streamlines the menu based control system.
This simplified menu based system is what I feel just adds to the user friendliness and ergonomics of the Olympus range.
Having said this the camera has a full manual control mode, with dial access through the round toggle dial on the rear of the unit. Obviously compared to a DSLR this is a little cumbersome, but with practice can be used reasonably efficiently.
Like all micro four thirds sensors this camera suffers for hand held photography when light levels fall, although the in-body camera stabilisation is impressive on all the Olympus bodies I have tried so far.
For such a small camera system the photo quality can be impressive. These are a few Australian Wildlife images that were captured with this camera.
