A Second Look: Olympus E-3

With the flurry of winter camera introductions at PMA, it's worth revisiting last fall's most noteworthy DSLR.

The people at Olympus have been known to joke about the Olympus E-2, the digital SLR that should have succeeded the pioneering but long-in-the-tooth Olympus E-1. I'm not clear how close to reality that camera ever came, but no matter. The Olympus E-3, the E-1's long-awaited, much-anticipated top-of-the-line successor, skips generations not just in name but in technology, and was worth the wait.

We've covered this ten-megapixel DSLR nut by boltelsewhere on the site, so it's not my intent to get into a detailed technical discussion. I shot a lot of pictures with it when it first came out (see the attached gallery, shot in Puerto Rico), and I thought image quality was excellent despite its smaller-than-average Four Thirds-format image sensor. Olympus credits this in part to the fact that the E-3's photodiodes -- which actually do the light gathering -- are the same size as the ones in the 7.5-megapixel EVOLT E-330. (Being a pro-oriented model, the E-3 drops the consumer-oriented EVOLT name, BTW.)

As our colleagues at Popular Photography & Imaging rightly observe, the Olympus E-3's high-ISO JPEGs are visibly noisier than, say, the Nikon D300's, so you should shoot RAW in low light -- but then shooting in RAW format is no big deal in terms of workflow anymore. And there's more to image quality than noise; in fact, I found myself making an unusually small number of adjustments to the E-3's output. The E-3 is so good, overall, that I need to put in my two or three cents. And as I look the camera over again after a few months of not using it, I'm finding features I missed the first time around.

The Olympus E-3 is, in fact, much more sophisticated than I expected it to be, and my expectations weren't low. At about $1,700, it's arguably more camera for the money than you even get with mid-tier models costing a few hundred dollars less. That's because it does lots of things those competitors cannot. Many of these abilities are generally very useful, some less so but valuable for specific applications.

As a result, the E-3 has a level of complexity that I also didn't quite expect, and therefore a steeper learning curve than with competing models. Those models I can pretty much pick up and get a grip on right away, though of course it helps that they have consistent family traits. I didn't have that experience with the E-3. So my advice -- more than ever -- is to read the manual! I did, and while not a page turner it is clear and detailed, with nothing seemingly lost in translation.

Russell Hart

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